The Oxford History of

World Cinema

EDITED BY GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Butler & Tanner Ltd Frome and London

I should like to dedicate this book to the memory of my father, who did not live to see it

finished, and to my children, for their enjoyment.

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in preparation and in the course of it I have received help

from many quarters. I am grateful first of all to my contributors, and in particular to those

who, as well as diligently writing their own contributions to the book, also acted as

informal advisers on the project -- notably Thomas Elsaesser, Charles Musser, Ashish

Rajadhyaksha, and A. L. Rees. I also received specialist advice from Stephen Bottomore,

Pam Cook, Rosalind Delmar, Hugh Denman, Joel Finler, June Givanni, David Parkinson,

Jasia Reichert, and, most valuably of all, from Markku Salmi. I had administrative help in

the early stages from my niece Rebecca Nowell-Smith, and editorial assistance -- all too

briefly-from Sam Cook. For the last two years my Assistant Editor has been Kate

Beetham, to whom my debt is indescribable. Lael Lowinstein helped with the

bibliography. Picture research was conducted by Liz Heasman, whose knowledge and

judgement are unrivalled in this tricky field. The tiresome work of tracing picture

permissions devolved on Vicki Reeve and Diana Morris. For this normally thankless task

they deserve particular thanks. And thanks, too, to my editors at the Oxford University

Press, Andrew Lockett and Frances Whistler, especially for their patience.

Translations are by Robert Gordon ( Italy: Spectacle and Melodrama, The Scandinavian

Style, Italy from Fascism to Neo-Realism, Italy: Auteurs and After); Gerald Brooke ( The

Soviet Union and the Russian Émigrés); Timothy Seaton ( Cinema in the Soviet

Republics); and Nina Taylor ( Yiddish Cinema in Europe, East Central Europe before the

Second World War, Changing States in East Central Europe).

G.N.-S.

Contributors

Richard Abel ( USA)

Rick Altman ( USA)

Roy Armes (UK)

John Belton ( USA)

Janet Bergstrom ( USA)

Chris Berry ( Australia)

Hans-Michael Bock ( Germany)

David Bordwell ( USA)

Royal Brown ( USA)

Edward Buscombe (UK)

Michael Chanan (UK)

Paolo Cherchi Usai ( USA)

Donald Crafton ( USA)

Stephen Crofts ( Australia)

Chris Darke (UK)

Rosalind Delmar (UK)

Karel Dibbets ( Netherlands)

Michael Donnelly ( USA)

Phillip Drummond (UK)

Michael Eaton (UK)

Thomas Elsaesser ( Netherlands)

Cathy Fowler (UK)

Freda Freiberg ( Australia)

David Gardner ( USA)

Douglas Gomery ( USA)

Peter Graham ( France)

David Hanan ( Australia)

Phil Hardy (UK)

John Hawkridge (UK)

Susan Hayward (UK)

Marek and Malgorzata Hendrykowski ( Poland)

Michèle Hilmes ( USA)

Vida Johnson ( USA)

Anton Kaes ( USA)

Yusuf Kaplan (UK)

Philip Kemp (UK)

Peter Kenez ( USA)

Vance Kepley ( USA)

Marsha Kinder ( USA)

Hiroshi Komatsu ( Japan)

Antonia Lant ( USA)

Li Cheuk-to ( Hong Kong)

Jill McGreal. (UK)

Joe McElhaney ( USA)

P. Vincent Magombe (UK)

Richard Maltby (UK)

Martin Marks ( USA)

Morando Morandini ( Italy)

William Moritz ( USA)

Charles Musser ( USA)

Hamid Naficy ( USA)

James Naremore ( USA)

Kim Newman (UK)

Natalia Nussinova ( Russia)

Ed O'Neill ( USA)

Roberta Pearson (UK)

Duncan Petrie (UK)

Graham Petrie ( Canada)

Jim Pines (UK)

Jean Radvanyi ( France)

Ashish Rajadhyaksha ( India)

A. L. Rees (UK)

Mark A. Reid ( USA)

Eric Rentschler ( USA)

David Robinson (UK)

Bill Routt ( Australia)

Daniela Sannwald ( Germany)

Joseph Sartelle ( USA)

Thomas Schatz ( USA)

Ben Singer ( USA)

Vivian Sobchack ( USA)

Gaylyn Studlar ( USA)

Yuri Tsivian ( Latvia)

William Uricchio ( Netherlands)

Ruth Vasey ( Australia)

Ginette Vincendeau (UK)

Linda Williams ( USA)

Brian Winston (UK)

Esther Yau ( USA)

June Yip ( USA)

Contents

SPECIAL FEATURES XV

LIST OF COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONS XVII

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XIX

REFERENCES XXII

INTRODUCTION 3

Origins and Survival PAOLO CHERCHI USAI 6

Early Cinema ROBERTA PEARSON 13

Transitional Cinema ROBERTA PEARSON 23

The Hollywood Studio System DOUGLAS GOMERY 43

The World-Wide Spread of Cinema RUTH VASEY 53

The First World War and the Crisis in Europe WILLIAM URICCHIO 62

Tricks and Animation DONALD CRAFTON 71

Comedy DAVID ROBINSON 78

Documentary CHARLES MUSSER 86

Cinema and the Avant-Garde A. L. REES 95

Serials BEN SINGER 105

French Silent Cinema RICHARD ABEL 112

Italy: Spectacle and Melodrama PAOLO CHERCHI USAI 123

British Cinema from Hepworth to Hitchcock JOHN HAWKRIDGE 130

Germany: The Weimar Years THOMAS ELSAESSER 136

The Scandinavian Style PAOLO CHERCHI USAI 151

Pre-Revolutionary Russia YURI TSIVIAN 159

The Soviet Union and the Russian Émigrés NATALIA NUSSINOVA 162

Yiddish Cinema in Europe MAREK & MALGORZATA HENDRYKOWSKI 174

Japan: Before the Great Kanto Earthquake HIROSHI KOMATSU 177

Music and the Silent Film MARTIN MARKS 183

The Heyday of the Silents GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH 192

INTRODUCTION 207

The Introduction of Sound KAREL DIBBETS 211

Hollywood: The Triumph of the Studio System THOMAS SCHATZ 220

Censorship and Self-Regulation RICHARD MALTBY 235

The Sound of Music MARTIN MARKS 248

Technology and Innovation JOHN BELTON 259

Animation WILLIAM MORITZ 267

Cinema and Genre RICK ALTMAN 276

The Western EDWARD BUSCOMBE 286

TheMusical RICK ALTMAN 294

Crime Movies PHIL HARDY 304

The Fantastic VIVIAN SOBCHACK 312

Documentary CHARLES MUSSER 322

Socialism, Fascism, and Democracy GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH 333

The Popular Art of French Cinema GINETTE VINCENDEAU 344

Italy from Fascism to Neo-Realism MORANDO MORANDINI 353

Britain at the End of Empire ANTONIA LANT 361

Germany: Nazism and After ERIC RENTSCHLER 374

East Central Europe Before the Second World War MALGORZATA

ENDRYKOWSKA 383

Soviet Film Under Stalin PETER KENEZ 389

Indian Cinema: Origins to Independence ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA

China Before 1949 CHRIS BERRY 409

The Classical Cinema in Japan HIROSHI KOMATSU 413

The Emergence of Australian Film BILL ROUTT 422

Cinema in Latin America MICHAEL CHANAN 427

After the War GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH 436

Transformation of the Hollywood System DOUGLAS GOMERY 443

Independents and Mavericks GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH 451

INTRODUCTION 463

Television and the Film Industry MICHÉLE HILMES 466

The New Hollywood DOUGLAS GOMERY 475

New Technologies JOHN BELTON 483

Sex and Sensation LINDA WILLIAMS 490

The Black Presence in American Cinema JIM PINES 497

Exploitation and the Mainstream KIM NEWMAN 509

Dreams and Nightmares in the Hollywood Blockbuster JOSEPH SARTELLE 516

Cinema Verité and the New Documentary CHARLES MUSSER 527

Avant-Garde Film: The Second Wave A. L. REES 537

Animation in the Post-Industrial Era WILLIAM MORITZ 551

Modern Film Music ROYAL BROWN 558

Art Cinema GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH 567

New Directions in French Cinema PETER GRAHAM 576

Italy:Auteurs and After MORANDO MORANDINI 586

Spain After Franco MARSHA KINDER 596

British Cinema: The Search for Identity DUNCAN PETRIE 604

The New German Cinema ANTON KAES 614

East Germany: The DEFA Story HANS-MICHAEL BOCK 627

Changing States in East Central Europe MAREK HENDRYKOWSKI 632

Russia After the Thaw VIDA JOHNSON 640

Cinema in the Soviet Republics JEAN RADVANYI 651

Turkish Cinema YUSUF KAPLAN 656

The Arab World ROY ARMES 661

The Cinemas of Sub-Saharan Africa P. VINCENT MAGOMBE 667

Iranian Cinema HAMID NAFICY 672

India: Filming the Nation ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA 678

Indonesian Cinema DAVID HANAN 690

China After the Revolution ESTHER YAU 693

Popular Cinema in Hong Kong LI CHEUK-TO 704

Taiwanese New Cinema JUNE YIP 711

The Modernization of Japanese Film HIROSHI KOMATSU 714

New Australian Cinema STEPHEN CROFTS 722

New Zealand Cinema BILL ROUTT 731

Canadian Cinema / Cinéma Canadien JILL MCGREAL 731

New Cinemas in Latin America MICHAEL CHANAN 740

New Concepts of Cinema GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH 750

The Resurgence of Cinema GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH 759

BIBLIOGRAPHY 767

INDEX 785

PICTURE SOURCES 823

Special Features

Chantal Akerman 755

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea 744

Robert Altman 470 -1

Michelangelo Antonioni 568 -9

Arletty 347

Fred Astaire 296 -7

Brigitte Bardot 492

Yevgeny Bauer 160 -1

Ingmar Bergman 572 -3

Ingrid Bergman 230 -1

Bernardo Bertolucci 593

Frank Borzage 64 -5

Marlon Brando 444 -5

Luis Buñuel 432 -3

Bugs Bunny 269

John Cassavetes 542 -3

Youssef Chahine 664

Lon Chaney 198 -9

Charlie Chaplin 84 -5

Maurice Chevalier 246

Raoul Coutard 487

Franco Cristaldi 595

David Cronenberg 736

George Cukor 282

Anatole Dauman 571

Bette Davis 222 -3

Alain Delon 579

Cecil B. DeMille 34 -5

Gérard Depardieu 585

Vittorio De Sica 360

Marlene Dietrich 240 -1

'Don'ts and Be Carefuls' 239

Alexander Dovzhenko 394 -5

Carl Theodor Dreyer 102 -3

Clint Eastwood 472 -3

Sergei Eisenstein 168 -9

Douglas Fairbanks 60

Rainer Werner Fassbinder 618 -19

Federico Fellini 587

Louis Feuillade 108 -9

Gracie Fields 366 -7

Gabriel Figueroa 430 -1

John Ford 288 -9

Jodie Foster 478 -9

Karl Freund 314 -15

Jean Gabin 307

Greta Garbo 190 -1

Judy Garland 226 -7

Ritwik Ghatak 686 -7

Dorothy andLillian Gish 40 -1

Jean-Luc Godard 752 -3

Sid Grauman 52

D. W. Griffith 30 -1

Yilmaz Güney 659

William S. Hart 68

Howard Hawks 278 -9

Will Hays 238

Robert Herlth 148 -9

Werner Herzog 620 -1

Alfred Hitchcock 310 -11

James Wong Howe 200 -1

John Huston 448 -9

Daisuke Ito 180

Joris Ivens 331

Humphrey Jennings 328 -9

Alfred Junge 380 -1

Buster Keaton 80 -1

Alexander Korda 336 -7

Stanley Kubrick 458 -9

Akira Kurosawa 716

Burt Lancaster 452 -3

Fritz Lang 196 -7

Spike Lee 508

Val Lewton 318 -19

Max Linder 117

The Loop and the Maltese Cross 7

Joseph Losey 606 -7

Ernst Lubitsch 184 -5

Alexander Mackendrick 371

Chris Marker 530 -1

Joseph P. Maxfield 213

William Cameron Menzies 232 -3

Oscar Micheaux 499

Vincente Minnelli 302 -3

Tom Mix 69

Kenji Mizoguchi 418 -19

Marilyn Monroe 256 -7

Ivan Mosjoukine 166

F. W. Murnau 146 -7

Nargis 404

Jack Nicholson 510 -11

Asta Nielsen 26

Manoel de Oliveira 602 -3

Max Ophuls 252 -3

Nagisa Oshima 718

Yasujiro Ozu 420 -1

Pier Paolo Pasolini 494 -5

Mary Pickford 56 -7

Sidney Poitier 504 -5

Erich Pommer 145

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 368 -9

M. G. Ramachandran 406 -7

Satyajit Ray 682 -3

Jean Renoir 338 -9

Paul Robeson 341

Glauber Rocha 742

Roberto Rossellini 438

Jean Rouch 529

Joe Schenck 49

Arnold Schwarzenegger 517

Martin Scorsese 764 -5

Sembene Ousmane 668 -9

Victor Sjöström 156 -7

Steven Spielberg 520 -1

Barbara Stanwyck 284

Ladislas Starewitch 76

Josef von Sternberg 216 -17

Erich von Stroheim 54 -5

Andrei Tarkovsky 646 -7

Jacques Tati 351

Gregg Toland 262 -3

Totb 356

Alexandre Trauner 346

Rudolph Valentino 44 -5

Agnés Varda 757

Conrad Veidt 140

Dziga Vertov 92 -3

Luchino Visconti 440 -1

Andrzej Wajda 634

Andy Warhol 544 -5

John Wayne 290

Orson Welles 454 -3

Wim Wenders 624 -5

Shirley Yamaguchi 410

Zhang Yimou 702

General Introduction

GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH

The cinema, wrote the documentarist Paul Rotha in the 1930s, 'is the great unresolved

equation between art and industry'. It was the first, and is arguably still the greatest, of the

industrialized art forms which have dominated the cultural life of the twentieth century.

From the humble beginnings in the fairground it has risen to become a billiondollar

industry and the most spectacular and original contemporary art.

As an art form and as a technology, the cinema has been in existence for barely a hundred

years. Primitive cinematic devices came into being and began to be exploited in the

1890s, almost simultaneously in the United States, France, Germany, and Great Britain.

Within twenty years the cinema had spread to all parts of the globe; it had developed a

sophisticated technology, and was on its way to becoming a major industry, providing the

most popular form of entertainment to audiences in urban areas throughout the world, and

attracting the attention of entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, and politicians. As well as for

entertainment, the film medium has come to be used for purposes of education,

propaganda, and scientific research. Originally formed from a fusion of elements

including vaudeville, popular melodrama, and the illustrated lecture, it rapidly acquired

artistic distinctiveness, which it is now beginning to lose as other forms of mass

communication and entertainment have emerged alongside it to threaten its hegemony.

To compress this complex history into a single volume has been, needless to say, a

daunting task. Some developments have to be presented as central, while others are

relegated to the margins, or even left out entirely. Certain principles have guided me in

this work. For a start, this is a history of the cinema, not of film. It does not deal with

every use of the film medium but focuses on those which have concurred to turn the

original invention of moving images on celluloid into the great institution known as the

cinema, or 'the movies'. The boundaries of cinema in this sense are wider than just the

films that the institution produces and puts into circulation. They include the audience, the

industry, and the people who work in it-from stars to technicians to usherettes -- and the

mechanisms of regulation and control which determine which films audiences are

encouraged to see and which they are not. Meanwhile, outside the institution, but

constantly pressing in on it, is history in the broader sense, the world of wars and

revolution, of changes in culture, demography, and life-style, of geopolitics and the global

economy.

No understanding of films is possible without understanding the cinema, and no

understanding of the cinema is possible without recognizing that it -- more than any other

art, and principally because of its enormous popularity-has constantly been at the mercy

of forces beyond its control, while also having the power to influence history in its turn.

Histories of literature and music can perhaps be written (though they should not be)

simply as histories of authors and their works, without reference to printing and recording

technologies and the industries which deploy them, or to the world in which artists and

their audiences lived and live. With cinema this is impossible. Central to the project of

this book is the need to put films in the context without which they would not exist, let

alone have meaning.

Secondly, this is a history of cinema as, both in its origins and in its subsequent

development, above all popular art. It is popular art not in the old-fashioned sense of art

emanating from the 'people' rather than from cultured élites, but in the distinctively

twentieth-century sense of an art transmitted by mechanical means of mass diffusion and

drawing its strength from an ability to connect to the needs, interests, and desires of a

large, massified public. To talk about the cinema at the level at which it engages with this

large public is once again to raise, in an acute form, the question of cinema as art and

industry -- Paul Rotha's 'great unresolved equation'. Cinema is industrial almost by

definition, by virtue of its use of industrial technologies for both the making and the

showing of films. But it is also industrial in a stronger sense, in that, in order to reach

large audiences, the successive processes of production, distribution, and exhibition have

been industrially (and generally capitalistically) organized into a powerful and efficient

machine. How the machine works (and what happens when it breaks down) is obviously

of the greatest importance in understanding the cinema. But the history of the cinema is

not just a history of this machine, and certainly cannot be told from the point of view of

the machine and the people who control it. Nor is industrial cinema the only sort of

cinema. I have tried to give space in this volume not only for cinema as industry but also

for divergent interests, including those of film-makers who have worked outside or in

conflict with the industrial machinery of cinema.

This involves a recognition that in the cinema the demands of industry and art are not

always the same, but neither are they necessarily antithetical. It is rather that they are not

commensurate. The cinema is an industrial art form which has developed industrialized

ways of producing art. This is a fact which traditional aesthetics has had great difficulty in

coming to terms with, but it is a fact none the less. On the other hand, there are many

examples of films whose artistic status is dubious to say the least, and there are many

examples of films whose artistic value is defined in opposition to the values of the

industry on which they depended in order to be made. There is no simple answer to

Rotha's equation. My aim throughout the book has been to maintain a balance between

the values expressed through the market-place and those which are not.

Thirdly, this is a history of world cinema. This is a fact of which I am particularly proud

and which is true in two senses. On the one hand the book tells the history of the cinema

as a single global phenomenon, spreading rapidly across the world and controlled, to a

large degree, by a single set of interlocking commercial interests. But it also, on the other

hand, tells the history of many different cinemas, growing in different parts of the world

and asserting their right to independent existence often in defiance of the forces

attempting to exercise control and to 'open up' (that is to say, dominate) the market on a

global scale.

Finding a way to relate the two senses of the phrase world cinema', and to balance the

competing claims of the global cinema institution and the many different cinemas which

exist throughout the world, has been the biggest single challenge in planning and putting

together this book. The sheer diversity of world cinema, the number of films made (many

of which do not circulate outside national borders), and the variety of cultural and

political contexts in which the world's cinemas have emerged, means that it would be

foolish or arrogant, or both, for any one person to attempt to encompass the entire history

of cinema single-handed. This is not just a question of knowledge but also of perspective.

In presenting a picture of world cinema in all its complexity, I have been fortunate in

being able to call upon a team of contributors who are not only expert in their own fields

but are in many cases able to bring to their subject a 'feel' for the priorities and the issues

at stake which I, as an outsider, would never be able to replicate -- even if I knew as much

as they do, which I do not. This has been particularly valuable in the case of India and

Japan, countries whose cinemas rival Hollywood in scale but are known in the west only

in the most partial, fragmentary, and unhistorical fashion.

Giving space to multiple perspectives is one thing. It is also important to be able to bring

them all together and to give a sense of the interlocking character of the many aspects of

cinema in different places and at different times. At one level the cinema may be one big

machine, but it is composed of many parts, and many different attitudes can be taken both

to the parts and to the whole. The points of view of audiences (and there is no such thing

as 'the' audience), of artists (and there is no single prototype of 'the artist'), and of film

industries and industrialists (and again there is not just one industry) are often divergent.

There is also the problem, familiar to all historians, of trying to balance history 'as it

happened' -and as it was seen by the participants -- with the demands of present-day

priorities and forms of knowledge (including present-day ignorance). No less familiar to

historians is the question of the role of individuals within the historical machine, and here

the cinema offers a particular paradox since unlike other industrial machineries it not only

depends on individuals but also creates them -in the form, most conspicuously, of the

great film stars who are both producers of cinema and its product. In respect of all these

questions I have seen my task as editor as one of trying to show how different

perspectives can be related, rather than imposing a single all-encompassing point of view.

HOW THE BOOK IS ARRANGED

An editor's chief weapon is organization, and it is through the way the book is organized

that I have attempted to give form to the interrelation of different perspectives as outlined

above. The book is divided chronologically into three parts: the Silent Cinema, the Sound

Cinema from 1930 to 1960, and the Modern Cinema from 1960 to the present. In each

part the book looks first at aspects of the cinema in general during the period in question,

and then at cinemas in particular parts of the world. The general essays cover subjects

such as the studio system, technology, film genres, and a range of developments in both

mainstream and independent cinema in America, Europe, and elsewhere.

As far as possible I have tried to ensure that each development is covered from a broad

international perspective, in recognition of the fact that from the earliest times the cinema

has developed in remarkably similar ways throughout the industrial world. But it is also a

fact that, from the end of the First World War onwards, one film industry -- the American

-- has played a dominant role, to such an extent that much of the history of cinema in

other countries has consisted of attempts by the indigenous industries to thwart, compete

with, or distinguish themselves from American ('Hollywood') competition. The American

cinema therefore occupies a central position throughout the 'general' sections of the book,

and there is no separate consideration of American cinema as a 'national cinema' along

with the French, Japanese, Soviet, and other cinemas. Coverage in the 'national', or 'world

cinema', sections extends to all the major cinemas of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia,

and the Americas. With some regret, however, I decided that in the area of Asian cinema

(the world's largest) it was preferable to concentrate on a study in depth of the most

important and representative national cinemas rather than attempt an overview of every

filmproducing country. The areas focused on are the three major Chinese-language

cinemas (those of the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), and the

cinemas of Japan, Indonesia, India, and Iran. I also soon realized that almost any way of

grouping world cinemas, and especially forms of grouping based on notions like First,

Second, and Third World, was highly prejudicial; the 'national' or 'world cinema' sections

are therefore simply strung out in a roughly west to east geographical order. This

sometimes means that cinemas that show political or cultural similarities are grouped

together. For example, East Central Europe, Russia, and the Soviet Republics of the

Caucasus and Central Asia are both geographically adjacent and shared a common

political system in the period 1948-90, and are covered in succession in Part III. But

mainland China, which also shared that system (and whose cinema was shaped by similar

ideological imperatives), is grouped with the other Chinese-speaking cinemas of Hong

Kong and Taiwan. In all three parts of the book the journey starts in France, but in Part I it

ends in Japan, and in Parts II and III in Latin America. While the decision to start in

France may be taken to imply a certain priority, the form taken by the journey thereafter

emphatically does not.

The various world cinemas are also dealt with in terms of the time of their emergence on

the world stage. In Part I there are relatively few; there are more in Part II, and a lot more

in Part III. This means that a number of essays in Part II and even more in Part III also

delve back into the earlier history of the cinema in the country concerned. This minor

violation of the chronological structure of the book seemed to me better than pedantically

assigning, say, Iranian silent films to the silent cinema section, rather than to a single,

coherent essay on Iran.

For reasons made clear at the beginning of this introduction, many of the essays in the

book focus on institutional factors -- on industry and trade, on censorship, and so on --

and on the conditions surrounding the activity of film-making, as much as they do on

films and filmmakers. It is also sadly the case that it is simply not possible, in a book of

this size, to do justice to all the many individuals who have played noteworthy roles in the

history of cinema. But the lives and careers of individual artists, technicians, or producers

are not only interesting in their own right, they can also illuminate with particular clarity

how the cinema works as a whole. In a way the story of Orson Welles, for example, who

spent his career either in conflict with the studio system or in attempts to make films

outside it entirely, can tell one more about the system than any number of descriptions of

how life was lived within it. To help provide this illumination, as well as for intrinsic

interest, the text of the book is interspersed with 'insets' devoted to individual film-

makers-actors, directors, producers, and technicians-who have contributed in various

ways to making the cinema what it has become.

The choice of individuals to feature has been inspired by a number of overlapping criteria.

Some have been chosen because they are obviously important and well known, and no

history of the cinema would be complete without some extended treatment of their

careers. Examples in this category -- taken more or less at random -- include D. W.

Griffith, Ingmar Bergman, Marilyn Monroe, and Alain Delon. But there are other people

-- the Indian'megastars' Nargis or M. G. Ramachandran, for instance -- who are less well

known to western readers but whose careers have an equal claim to be featured in a

history of world cinema. The need for different perspectives has also dictated the

inclusion of independent women film-makers (Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman) and

documentarists (Humphrey Jennings, Joris Ivens) alongside more mainstream directors.

All these examples can be seen as illustrative or typical of something about the cinema

which a more orthodox account of film history might not adequately reflect. But I have

been tempted to go further, and have also chosen for 'inset' treatment one or two

individuals whose careers can hardly be described as typical but which throw light on

some of the rich diversity and occasional oddity of cinema, and the place it occupies in

the world. The result, needless to say, is that alongside the individuals who are featured

there are also many whom readers might expect to be on the list, but for whom a place

was not found. This will no doubt lead to disagreements and occasional disappointments,

particularly where personal favourites are not among the list of those accorded 'inset'

treatment. But it is not possible to accommodate all tastes, and, more to the point, the

purpose of the insets (as I hope I have made clear) is not to be a pantheon of 150 great

names but to illuminate the cinema across the board.

In the first century of its existence the cinema has produced works of art worthy to stand

comparison with the masterworks of painting, music, and literature. But these are only the

tip of the iceberg of an art form whose growth to pre-eminence has been without

precedent in the history of world culture. Even more than that, the cinema is ineradicably

embedded in the whole history of the twentieth century. It has helped to shape, as well as

to reflect, the reality of our times, and to give form to the aspirations and dreams of

people the world over. More than anything else, this book aims to give a sense of this

unique achievement and to illuminate not only the richness of cinema itself but the place

it occupies in the wider world of culture and history.

REFERENCES

Each essay in the book is followed by a short list of books either referred to as sources by

the author or recommended as further reading. Priority has been given to works which are

easily accessible in English; but where (as sometimes happens) no adequate source exists

in English or other major western languages, more recondite sources may be cited. Full

bibliographical references for all works cited are given in the general bibliography at the

end of the book. Besides a list of books, the insets are also followed by a selected

filmography.

In the matter of foreign film titles, no single rule has been applied. Films which have a

generally accepted release title in English-speaking countries are usually referred to under

that title, with the original title in parentheses the first time the film is mentioned. For

films which have no generally accepted English title the original title is used throughout,

followed by an English translation in parentheses and quotation marks on first occurrence.

But in the case of some European and Asian countries, translated titles are used

throughout. The Pinyin transcription has been used for Chinese names, except in the case

of Taiwanese and Hong Kong artists who themselves use other transcriptions. Russian

personal names and film titles have been transcribed in the 'popular' form. thus Eisenstein,

rather than the more correct but pedantic Eizenshtein; Alexander Nevsky rather than

Aleksandr Nevskii. Every effort has been made to render accents and diacriticals correct in

Scandinavian and Slavic languages, in Hungarian and in Turkish, and in the transcription

of Arabic, but I cannot promise that this has been achieved in every case.

1

Silent Cinema 1895-1930

Annette Benson in the British comedy Shooting Stars ( 1928), directed by A. V. Bramble and (uncredited) Anthony Asquith

Introduction

GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH

The history of the cinema in its first thirty years is one of unprecedented expansion and

growth. Beginning as a novelty in a handful of big cities -- New York, Paris, London, and

Berlin -- the new medium quickly found its way across the world, attracting larger and

larger audiences wherever it was shown and displacing other forms of entertainment as it

did so. As audiences grew, so did the places where films were shown, culminating in the

great 'picture palaces' of the 1920s which rivalled theatres and opera-houses for opulence

and splendour. Meanwhile films themselves developed from being short 'attractions', only

a couple of minutes long, to the feature length that has dominated the world's screens up

to the present day.

Although French, German, American, and British pioneers have all been credited with the

'invention' of cinema, the British and the Germans played a relatively small role in its

world-wide exploitation. It was above all the French, followed by the Americans, who

were the most ardent exporters of the new invention, helping to implant the cinema in

China, Japan, and Latin America as well as in Russia. In terms of artistic development it

was again the French and the Americans who took the lead, though in the years preceding

the First World War Italy, Denmark, and Russia also played a part.

In the end it was the United States that was to prove decisive. The United States was --

and has remained -- the largest single market for films. By protecting their own market

and pursuing a vigorous export policy, the Americans achieved a dominant position on the

world market by the eve of the First World War. During the war, while Europe languished,

the American cinema continued to develop, pioneering new techniques as well as

consolidating industrial control.

Meanwhile, in the United States itself, the centre of film-making had gravitated

westwards, to Hollywood, and it was films from the new Hollywood studios that flooded

on to the world's film markets in the years after the First World War -- and have done so

ever since. Faced with the Hollywood onslaught, few industries proved competitive. The

Italian industry, which had pioneered the feature film with lavish spectaculars like Quo

vadis? ( 1913) and Cabiria ( 1914), almost collapsed. In Scandinavia, the Swedish cinema

had a brief period of glory, notably with the powerful sagas of Victor Sjöström and the

brilliant comedies of Mauritz Stiller, before following Denmark into relative obscurity.

Even the French cinema found itself in a precarious position. In Europe, only Germany

proved industrially resilient, while in the new Soviet Union and in Japan the development

of the cinema took place in conditions of commercial isolation.

Hollywood took the lead artistically as well as industrially. Indeed the two aspects were

inseparable. Hollywood films appealed because they had betterconstructed narratives,

their effects were more grandiose, and the star system added a new dimension to screen

acting. Where Hollywood did not lead from its own resources it bought up artists and

technical innovations from Europe to ensure its continued dominance over present or

future competition. Sjöström, Stiller, and the latter's young protégé Greta Garbo were

lured away from Sweden, Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau from Germany; Fox acquired

many patents, including that of what was to become CinemaScope.

The rest of the world survived partly by learning from Hollywood and partly because

audiences continued to exist for a product which corresponded to needs which Hollywood

could not supply. As well as a popular audience, there were also increasing audiences for

films which were artistically more adventurous or which engaged with issues in the outer

world. Links were formed with the artistic avant-garde and with political groupings,

particularly on the left. Aesthetic movements emerged, allied to tendencies in the other

arts. Sometimes these were derivative, but in the Soviet Union the cinema was in the

vanguard of artistic development -- a fact which was widely recognized in the west. By

the end of the silent period, the cinema had established itself not only as an industry but

as the 'seventh art'.

None of this would have happened without technology, and cinema is in fact unique as an

art form in being defined by its technological character. The first section of Part I of this

book, ' The Early Years', therefore begins with the technical and material developments

that brought the cinema into being and helped rapidly to turn it into a major art form. In

these early years this art form was quite primitive, and uncertain of its future

development. It also took some time before the cinema acquired its character as a

predominantly narrative and fictional medium. We have therefore divided the history of

the first two decades of cinema into two: an early period proper (up to about 1905); and a

transitional period (up to the emergence of the feature film shortly before the First World

War), during which the cinema began to acquire that character as a form of narrative

spectacle which has principally defined it ever since.

The watershed came with the First World War, which definitively sealed American

hegemony, at least in the mainstream of development. The second section,'The Rise of

Hollywood', looks first at Hollywood itself in the 1910s and 1920s and the way the

Hollywood system operated as an integrated industry, controlling all aspects of cinema

from production to exhibition. The international ramifications of America's rise to

dominance are considered next. By 1914 the cinema was a truly world-wide business,

with films being made and shown throughout the industrialized world. But it was a

business in which the levers of power were operated from afar, first in Paris and London,

and then increasingly in New York and Hollywood, and it is impossible to understand the

development of world cinema without recognizing the effect that control of international

distribution had on nascent or established industries elsewhere.

As far as European cinema was concerned, the war provoked a crisis that was not merely

economic. Not only did European exporters such as France, Britain, and Italy lose control

over overseas markets, and find their own markets opened up to increasingly powerful

American competition, but the whole cultural climate changed in the aftermath of war.

The triumph of Hollywood in the 1920s was a triumph of the New World over the Old,

marking the emergence of the canons of modern American mass culture not only in

America but in countries as yet uncertain how to receive it.

Early cinema programmes were a hotch-potch of items, mingling actualities, comic

sketches, free-standing narratives, serial episodes, and the occasional trick or animated

film. With the coming of the feature-length narrative as centrepiece of the programme,

other types of film were relegated to a secondary position, or forced to find alternative

viewing contexts. This did not in fact hinder their development, but tended rather to

reinforce their distinct identities. The making of animated cartoons became a separate

branch of film-making, generally practised outside the major studios, and the same was

true of serials. Together with newsreels, both cartoons and serial episodes tended to be

shown as short items in a programme culminating in the feature, though some of Louis

Feuillade's serials in France could fill a whole programme and there were occasional

attempts at feature-length animation. Of the genres emerging out of the early cinema,

however, it was really only slapstick comedy that successfully developed in both short

and feature format. While Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton made a successful transition

to features in the early 1920s, the majority of silent comedians, including Stan Laurel and

Oliver Hardy, built their careers in the silent period almost entirely around the short film.

The section 'The Silent Film' looks at the kinds of film, like animation, comedy, and

serials, which continued to thrive alongside the dramatic feature in the 1920s, and also at

the factual film or documentary, which acquired an increasing distinctiveness as the

period progressed, and at the rise of avant-garde film-making parallel (and sometimes

counter) to the mainstream. Both documentary and the avant-garde achieved occasional

commercial successes ( Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North ran for several months in a

cinema in Paris; and works by French 'impressionist' film-makers like Jean Epstein and

Germaine Dulac also attracted substantial audiences). On the whole, however,

documentary and the avant-garde were non-commercial forms, with values distinct from

the mainstream and a cultural and political role that cannot be assessed in commercial

terms. The film avant-garde had an important place in the modernist art movements of the

1920s, especially in France (with Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray), but

also in Germany (Hans Richter) and the Soviet Union, and this modernist impulse was to

animate documentary both in the 1920s (Dziga Vertov in the Soviet Union, Walter

Ruttmann in Germany) and after.

Of the countries which developed and managed to sustain distinctive national cinemas in

the silent period the most important were France, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Of

these, the French cinema displayed the most continuity, in spite of the crisis provoked by

the war and the economic uncertainties of the post-war period. The German cinema, by

contrast, relatively insignificant in the pre-war years, exploded on to the world scene with

the 'expressionist' Cabinet of Dr Caligari in 1919 and throughout the Weimar period

succeeded in harnessing a wide spectrum of artistic energies into new cinematic forms.

Even more spectacular was the emergence of the Soviet cinema after the Revolution of

1917. The new Soviet cinema resolutely turned its back on the past, leaving the style of

the pre-war Russian cinema to be perpetuated by the many émigrés who fled westwards

to escape the Revolution. The section on National Cinemas gives separate treatment to all

three elements: the pre-revolutionary Russian cinema, recently rediscovered; the Soviet

cinema; and the Russian émigrés.

The other countries whose cinemas merit an article of their own in this Part are: Britain,

which had an interesting but relatively undistinguished history in the silent period; Italy,

which had a brief moment of international fame just before the war; the Scandinavian

countries, mainly Denmark and Sweden, which played a role in the development of silent

cinema quite out of proportion to their small populations; and Japan, where a cinema

developed based on traditional theatrical and other art forms and only gradually adapted

to western influence. Space is also given to the unique phenomenon of the transnational

Yiddish cinema, which flourished in eastern and central Europe in the inter-war years.

For most of these articles the period covered is from the earliest days up to the

introduction of synchronized sound at the end of the 1920s. For the German cinema,

however, the cut-off point is the Nazi takeover in 1933. For similar reasons the story of

Yiddish cinema is carried up to 1939, when it was brutally terminated by the Holocaust.

In the case of Japan, only the years up to the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 are covered

in this part, and the later development of silent cinema in Japan, which went on well into

the 1930s, is dealt with in Part II.

Silent cinema is strictly speaking a misnomer, for although films themselves were silent,

the cinema was not. The showing of early films, particularly non-fiction, was often

accompanied by a lecturer or barker, and in Japan there developed the remarkable

institution of the benshi, who both commented on the action and spoke the dialogue. It

was largely because of the benshi that silent film survived in Japan long after other

countries had converted to sound. Universal throughout the 'silent' cinema, however, was

musical accompaniment, which ranged from improvisations on an out-of-tune piano to

full orchestral scores by composers of the calibre of Saint-Saëns ( L'Assassinat du Duc de

Guise, 1908) or Shostakovich ( New Babylon, 1929). Music was an integral part of the

silent film experience. The final section of this part looks first at the extraordinary

development of film music and its role in shaping the audience's perception, before

proceeding to an overview of what the silent cinema was like in its heyday in the 1920s.

THE EARLY YEARS

Origins and Survival

PAOLO CHERCHI USAI

PRE-CINEMA, FILM, TELEVISION

The history of cinema did not begin with a 'big bang'. No single event -- whether Edison's

patented invention of the Kinetoscope in 1891 or the Lumière brothers' first projection of

films to a paying audience in 1895 -- can be held to separate a nebulous pre-cinema from

cinema proper. Rather there is a continuum which begins with early experiments and

devices aimed at presenting images in sequence (from Étienne Gaspard Robertson's

Phantasmagoria of 1798 to Émile Reynaud's Pantomimes lumineuses of 1892) and

includes not only the emergence in the 1890s of an apparatus recognizable as cinema but

also the forerunners of electronic image-making. The first experiments in transmitting

images by a television-type device are in fact as old as the cinema: Adriano de Paiva

published his first studies on the subject in 1880, and Georges Rignoux seems to have

achieved an actual transmission in 1909. Meanwhile certain 'pre-cinema' techniques

continued to be used in conjunction with cinema proper during the years around 1900-5

when the cinema was establishing itself as a new mass medium of entertainment and

instruction, and lantern slides with movement effects continued for a long time to be

shown in close conjunction with film screenings.

Magic lantern, film, and television, therefore, do not constitute three separate universes

(and fields of study), but belong together as part of a single process of evolution. It is

none the less possible to distinguish them, not only technologically and in terms of the

way they were diffused, but also chronologically. The magic lantern show gradually gives

way to the film show at the beginning of the twentieth century, while television emerges

fully only in the second half of the century. In this succession, what distinguishes cinema

is on the one hand its technological base -- photographic images projected in quick

succession giving the illusion of continuity -- and on the other hand its use prevailingly as

large-scale public entertainment.

THE BASIC APPARATUS

Films produce their illusion of continuous movement by passing a series of discrete

images in quick succession in front of a light source enabling the images to be projected

on a screen. Each image is held briefly in front of the light and then rapidly replaced with

the next one. If the procedure is rapid and smooth enough, and the images similar enough

to each other, discontinuous images are then perceived as continuous and an illusion of

movement is created. The perceptual process involved was known about in the nineteenth

century, and given the name persistence of vision, since the explanation was thought to lie

in the persistence of the image on the retina of the eye for long enough to make

perception of each image merge into the perception of the next one. This explanation is no

longer regarded as adequate, and modern psychology prefers to see the question in terms

of brain functions rather than of the eye alone. But the original hypothesis was

sufficiently fertile to lead to a number of experiments in the 1880s and 1890s aimed at

reproducing the so-called persistence of vision effect with sequential photographs.

The purposes of these experiments were various. They were both scientific and

commercial, aimed at analysing movement and at reproducing it. In terms of the

emergence of cinema the most important were those which set out to reproduce

movement naturally, by taking pictures at a certain speed (a minimum of ten or twelve per

second and generally higher) and showing them at the same speed. In fact throughout the

silent period the correspondence between camera speed and projection was rarely perfect.

A projection norm of around 16 pictures ('frames') per second seems to have been the

most common well into the 1920s, but practices differed considerably and it was always

possible for camera speeds to be made deliberately slower or faster to produce effects of

speeded-up or slowed-down motion when the film was projected. It was only with the

coming of synchronized sound-tracks, which had to be played at a constant speed, that a

norm of 24 frames per second (f.p.s.) became standard for both camera and projector.

First of all, however, a mechanism had to be created which would enable the pictures to

be exposed in the camera in quick succession and projected the same way. A roll of

photographic film had to be placed in the camera and alternately held very still while the

picture was exposed and moved down very fast to get on to the next picture, and the same

sequence had to be followed when the film was shown. Moving the film and then

stopping it so frequently put considerable strain on the film itself -- a problem which was

more severe in the projector than in the camera, since the negative was exposed only once

whereas the print would be shown repeatedly. The problem of intermittent motion, as it is

called, exercised the minds of many of the pioneers of cinema, and was solved only by

the introduction of a small loop in the threading of the film where it passed the gate in

front of the lens (see inset).

FILM STOCK

The moving image as a form of collective entertainment -what we call 'cinema' --

developed and spread in the form of photographic images printed on a flexible and

semitransparent celluloid base, cut into strips 35 mm. wide. This material -- 'film' -- was

devised by Henry M. Reichenbach for George Eastman in 1889, on the basis of inventions

variously attributed to the brothers J. W. and I. S. Hyatt ( 1865), to Hannibal Goodwin

( 1888), and to Reichenbach himself. The basic components of the photographic film used

since the end of the nineteenth century have remained unchanged over the years. They

are: a transparent base, or support; a very fine layer of adhesive substrate made of

gelatine; and a light-sensitive emulsion which makes the film opaque on one side. The

emulsion generally consists of a suspension of silver salts in gelatine and is attached to

the base by means of the layer of adhesive substrate. The base of the great majority of 35

mm. films produced before February 1951 consists of cellulose nitrate, which is a highly

flammable substance. From that date onwards the nitrate base has been replaced by one of

cellulose acetate, which is far less flammable, or increasingly by polyester. From early

times, however, various forms of 'safety' film were tried out, at first using cellulose

diacetate (invented by Eichengrun and Becker as early as 1901), or by coating the nitrate

in non-flammable substances. The first known examples of these procedures date back to

1909. Safety film became the norm for non-professional use after the First World War.

The black and white negative film used up to the mid1920s was so-called orthochromatic.

It was sensitive to ultraviolet, violet, and blue light, and rather less sensitive to green and

yellow. Red light did not affect the silver bromide emulsion at all. To prevent parts of the

scene from appearing on the screen only in the form of indistinct dark blobs, early

cinematographers had to practise a constant control of colour values on the set. Certain

colours had to be removed entirely from sets and costumes. Actresses avoided red

lipstick, and interior scenes were shot against sets painted in various shades of grey. A

new kind of emulsion called panchromatic was devised for Gaumont by the Eastman

Kodak Company in 1912. In just over a decade it became the preferred stock for all the

major production companies. It was less light-sensitive in absolute terms than

orthochrome, which meant that enhanced systems of studio lighting had to be developed.

But it was far better balanced and allowed for the reproduction of a wider range of greys.

In the early days, however, celluloid film was not the only material tried out in the

showing of motion pictures. Of alternative methods the best known was the Mutoscope.

This consisted of a cylinder to which were attached several hundred paper rectangles

about 70 mm. wide. These paper rectangles contained photographs which, if watched in

rapid sequence through a viewer, gave the impression of continuous movement. There

were even attempts to produce films on glass: the Kammatograph ( 1901) used a disc with

a diameter of 30 cm., containing some 600 photographic frames arranged in a spiral.

There were experiments involving the use of translucent metal with a photographic

emulsion on it which could be projected by reflection, and films with a surface in relief

which could be passed under the fingers of blind people, on a principle similar to Braille.

FORMATS

The 35 mm. width (or 'gauge') for cellulose was first adopted in 1892 by Thomas Edison

for his Kinetoscope, a viewing device which enabled one spectator at a time to watch

brief segments of film. The Kinetoscope was such a commercial success that subsequent

machines for reproducing images in movement adopted 35 mm. as a standard format.

This practice had the support of the Eastman Company, whose photographic film was 70

mm. wide, and therefore only had to be cut lengthwise to produce film of the required

width. It is also due to the mechanical structure of the Kinetoscope that 35 mm. film has

four perforations, roughly rectangular in shape, on both sides of each frame, used for

drawing the film through the camera and projector. Other pioneers at the end of the

nineteenth century used a different pattern. The Lumière brothers, for example, used a

single circular perforation on each side. But it was the Edison method which was soon

adopted as standard, and remains so today. It was the Edison company too who set the

standard size and shape of the 35 mm. frame, at approximately 1 in. wide and 0.75 in.

high.

Although these were to become the standards, there were many experiments with other

gauges of film stock, both in the early period and later. In 1896 the Prestwich Company

produced a 60 mm. film strip, an example of which is preserved in the National Film and

Television Archive in London, and the same width (but with a different pattern of

perforations) was used by Georges Demený in France. The Veriscope Company in

America introduced a 63 mm. gauge; one film in this format still survives -- a record of

the historic heavyweight championship fight between Corbett and Fitzsimmons in 1897.

Around the same time Louis Lumière also experimented with 70 mm. film which yielded

a picture area 60 mm. wide and 45 mm. high. All these systems encountered technical

problems, particularly in projection. Though some further experiments took place towards

the end of the silent period, the use of wide gauges such as 65 and 70 mm. did not come

into its own until the late 1950s.

More important than any attempts to expand the image, however, were those aimed at

reducing it and producing equipment suitable for non-professional users.

In 1900 the French company Gaumont began marketing its 'Chrono de Poche', a portable

camera which used 15 mm. film with a single perforation in the centre. Two years later

the Warwick Trading Company in England introduced a 17.5 mm. film for amateurs,

designed to be used on a machine called the Biokam which (like the first Lumière

machines) doubled as camera, printer, and projector; this idea was taken up by Ernemann

in Germany and then by Pathé in France in the 1920s. Meanwhile in 1912 Pathé had also

introduced a system that used 28 mm. film on a non-flammable diacetate base and had a

picture area only slightly smaller than 35 mm.

An alternative to celluloid film, the Kammatograph (c. 1900) used a glass disc with the film frames arranged in a spiral

The amateur gauge par excellence, however, was 16 mm. on a non-flammable base,

devised by Eastman Kodak in 1920. In its original version, known as the Kodascope, this

worked on the reversal principle, producing a direct positive print on the original film

used in the camera. Kodak launched their 16 mm. film on the market in 1923, and around

the same time Pathé brought out their 'PathéBaby', using 9.5 mm. non-flammable stock.

For many years 9.5 was a fierce competitor with 16 mm., and it survived for a long time

as a reduced projection gauge both for amateur film-making and for the showing of films

originally made on 35 mm.

Filoteo Alberini, unidentified 70 mm. film ( 1911). Frame enlargement from a negative in the film collection at George Eastman

House, Rochester, NY

There were also more exotic formats, using film divided into parallel rows which could be

exposed in succession. Of these only Edison's Home Kinetoscope, using 22 mm. film

divided into three parallel rows with an image-width of just over 5 mm., each of them

separated by a line of perforations, had any significant commercial application.

COLOUR

As early as 1896, copies of films which had been handcoloured frame by frame with very

delicate brushes were available. The results achieved by this technique were often

spectacular, as in the case of Georges Méliès's Le Royaume des fées ( 1903), whose

images have the glow of medieval miniatures. It was very difficult, however, to ensure

that the colour occupied a precise area of the frame. To achieve this, Pathé in 1906

patented a mechanical method of colouring the base called Pathécolor. This method, also

known as 'au pochoir' in French and stencil in English, allowed for the application of half

a dozen different tonalities.

A far less expensive method was to give the film a uniform colour for each frame or

sequence in order to reinforce the figurative effect or dramatic impact. Basically there

were three ways of doing this. There was tinting, which was achieved either by applying a

coloured glaze to the base, or by dipping the film in a solution of coloured dyes, or by

using stock which was already coloured. Then there was toning, in which the silver in the

emulsion was replaced with a coloured metallic salt, without affecting the gelatine on the

film. And finally there was mordanting, a variety of toning in which the photographic

emulsion was treated with a non-soluble silver salt capable of fixing an organic colouring

agent. Tinting, toning, mordanting, and mechanical colouring could be combined, thus

multiplying the creative possibilities of each technique. A particularly fascinating

variation on tinting technique is provided by the Handschiegl Process (also known as the

Wyckoff-DeMille Process, 1916-31), which was an elaborate system derived from the

techniques of lithography.

The first attempts (by Frederick Marshall Lee and Edward Raymond Turner) to realize

colour films using the superimposition of red, green, and blue images date back to 1899.

But it was only in 1906 that George Albert Smith achieved a commercially viable result

with his Kinemacolor. In front of the camera Smith placed a semi-transparent disc divided

into two sectors: red and blue-green. The film was then projected with the same filters at a

speed of 32 frames per second, and the two primary colours were thus 'merged' in an

image which showed only slight chromatic variations but produced an undeniable overall

effect. Smith's invention was widely imitated and developed into three-colour systems by

Gaumont in 1913 and the German Agfa Company in 1915.

The first actual colour-sensitive emulsion was invented by Eastman Kodak around 1915

and shortly afterwards marketed under the trademark Kodachrome. This was still only a

two-colour system, but it was the first stage in a series of remarkable developments.

Around the same time a company founded by Herbert T. Kalmus, W. Burton Westcott,

and Daniel Frost Comstock -- the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation -- began

experimenting with a system based on the additive synthesis of two colours; disappointed

by the results thus obtained, the three changed tack in 1919 and began exploring (still

with two colours only) the possibility of using the principle of subtractive synthesis first

elaborated by Duclos du Hauron in 1868. This worked by combining images each of

which had filtered out light of a particular colour. When the images were combined, the

colour balance was restored. Using the subtractive principle the Technicolor team were

ready within three years to present a colour film -- The Toll of the Sea ( Chester M.

Franklin, Metro Pictures, 1922) -created on two negatives and consisting of two sets of

positive images with separate colours printed back to back.

The late 1910s and early 1920s saw many other inventions in the field of colour, but by

the end of the decade it was clear that Kalmus and his associates were way ahead of the

field, and it was their system that was to prevail for professional film-making throughout

the 1930s and 1940s. Meanwhile the great majority of films during the silent period

continued to be produced using one or other of the methods of colouring the print

described above. Literally black and white films were in the minority, generally those

made by smaller companies or comic shorts.

SOUND

Almost all 'silent' films had some sort of sound accompaniment. Early film shows had

lecturers who gave a commentary on the images going past on the screen, explaining their

content and meaning to the audience. In a number of non-western countries this practice

continued long beyond the early period. In Japan, where silent cinema remained the rule

well into the 1930s, there developed the art of the benshi, who provided gestures and an

original text to accompany the image.

Along with speech came music. This was at first improvised on the piano, then adapted

from the current popular repertoire, and then came to be specially commissioned. On big

occasions this music would be performed by orchestras, choirs, and opera singers, while a

small band or just a pianist would play in less luxurious establishlnents. Exhibitors who

could not afford the performance of original music had two choices. The first was to

equip a pianist, organist, or small band with a musical score, generally consisting of

selections of popular tunes and classics in the public domain ('cue sheets'), which

provided themes suitable to accompany different episodes of the film. The second, more

drastic, was to fall back on mechanical instruments, from the humble pianola to huge

fairground organs powered by compressed air into which the 'score' was inserted in the

form of a roll of punched paper.

Music was sometimes accompanied by noise effects. These were usually obtained by

performers equipped with a wide array of objects reproducing natural and artificial

sounds. But the same effects could be produced by machines, of which a particularly

famous and elaborate example was the one in use at the Gaumont Hippodrome cinema in

Paris.

From the beginning, however, the pioneers of the moving image had more grandiose

ambitions. As early as April 1895, Edison put forward a system for synchronizing his twin

inventions of phonograph and Kinetoscope. Pathé also seems to have attempted the

synchronization of films and discs around 1896. All such systems, however, were

hampered by the lack of amplification to project the sound in large auditoriums.

The alternative to synchronizing films and discs was to print the sound directly on the

film. The first experiments in this direction took place at the beginning of the century, and

in 1906 Eugéne-Auguste Lauste patented a machine capable of recording images and

sound on the same base.

An early example of split-screen technique in an unidentified documentary on Venice. Title on print Santa Lucia, c. 1912

It was only after the First World War that the decisive steps were taken towards the

achievement of synchronized sound film. The German team of Vogt, Engel, and Massolle

established a method of recording sound photographically by converting the sounds into

light patterns on a separate film strip and their TriErgon system was premièred in Berlin

in 1922. Kovalendov in the Soviet Union and Lee De Forest in the United States were

also working in the same direction. De Forest's Phonofilm ( 1923) involved the use of a

photoelectric cell to read a sound-track printed on the same strip of film as the image.

Meanwhile the introduction of electric recording and the thermionic valve as an offshoot

of radio technology solved the problem of amplifying the sound to make it audible in

theatres.

In 1926 the Hollywood studio Warner Bros. presented Don Juan, with John Barrymore,

using the Vitaphone system of sound synchronization. This was a sound-ondisc system,

linking the projector to large discs, 16 in. in diameter, which ran at a speed of 33¼ r.p.m.,

with the needle starting at the centre and going outwards. The Vitaphone system was used

again the following year for the first 'talking' picture, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, and

continued in being for a few more years. Meanwhile a rival studio, Fox, had bought up

the rights on the TriErgon and Photophone patents, using them to add sound to films that

had already been shot. Fox's Movietone soundon-film system proved far more practical

than Vitaphone, and became the basis for the generalized introduction of synchronized

sound in the early 1930s.

ASPECT RATIO

The size and shape of the 35 mm. film frame remained virtually unchanged throughout

the silent period, at about 23 mm. Oust under 1 in.) wide and 18 mm. (0.75 in.) high. The

spacing of the frames meant each foot of film contained 16 frames. This too has remained

unaltered, and continues to be the standard today. When projected, the ratio between

width and height worked out at between 1.31 and 1.38 to 1. With the coming of sound the

frame size was altered slightly to accommodate the sound-track, but the projection ratio

remained roughly the same -- at approximately 4:3 -- until the arrival of widescreen

processes in the 1950s. In the silent and early sound periods there were a few attempts to

change the size and shape of the projected picture. The sides of the frame were

occasionally masked out, to produce a square picture, as in the case of Murnau's Tabu

( 1931). In 1927 the Frenchman Henri Chrétien presented the first anamorphic system,

known as Hypergonar, in which the image was 'squeezed' by the camera lens to

accommodate a wider picture on the frame, and then 'unsqueezed' in the projector for

presentation on a wide screen. This was an early forerunner of CinemaScope and the

other anamorphic systems which came into commercial use in the 1950s. Other

experiments included Magnascope ( 1926), which used a wide-angle projector lens to fill

a large screen, and devices for linking multiple projectors together. As early as 1900

Raoul Grimoin-Sanson attempted to hitch up ten 70 mm. projectors to produce a 360-

degree 'panorama' completely surrounding the spectator. More famous (though equally

ephemeral) was the Polyvision system used in the celebrated 'triptych' sequence in Abel

Gance's Napoléon ( 1927), where three strips of film are simultaneously projected

alongside each other to produce a single image.

PROJECTION

The normal method of projection from the earliest times involved placing the projector at

the back of the hall and projecting the image on to the screen in a cone of light over the

heads of the audience. Occasional attempts were made to devise alternative spatial

arrangements. In 1909, for example, the German Messter Company experimented with

showing its 'Alabastra' colour films through a complex system of mirrors on to a thin

veiled screen from a projection booth placed under the theatre floor. It was also possible

to project on to the screen from behind, but this process (known as back-projection) took

up a lot of space and has rarely been used for public presentation. It came into use in the

sound period as a form of special effect during film-making allowing actors to perform in

front of a previously photographed landscape background.

Throughout the silent years projectors, whether handcranked or electrically powered, all

ran at variable speeds, enabling the operator to adjust the speed of the projector to that of

the camera. For its part, camera speed varied according to a number of factors: the

amount of available light during shooting, the sensitivity of the film stock, and the nature

of the action being recorded. To keep the movements of the characters on the screen

'natural', projectionists in the years before 1920 showed films at various speeds, most

often between 14 and 18 frames per second. (The flicker effect that these relatively slow

speeds tended to produce was eliminated by the introduction early in the century of a

three-bladed shutter which opened and closed three times during the showing of each

frame.) The average speed of projection increased as time went on, and by the end of the

period it had regularly reached a norm of 24 frames per second, which became the

standard for sound film. Faster and slower speeds were occasionally used for colour film

experiments or in some amateur equipment.

The quality of projection was greatly affected by the type of light source being used.

Before electric arc lights became standard, the usual method of producing light for the

projector was to heat a piece of lime or a similar substance until it glowed white hot. The

efficacy of this method (known as 'limelight') was very dependent on the nature and

quality of the fuel used to heat the lime. The usual fuels were a mixture of coal-gas and

oxygen or of ether and oxygen. Acetylene was also tried, but soon abandoned as it

produced a weak light and gave off a disagreeable smell.

FROM PRODUCTION TO EXHIBITION

It is not known (and probably never will be known) exactly how many films of all types

were produced during the silent period, but the figure is almost certainly in the order of

150,000, of which not more than 20,000 to 25,000 are known to have survived. With the

rapid growth of the film business, films soon came to be printed in large numbers. For

Den hvide slavehandel II ('The white slave trade II', August Blom, 1911) the Danish

company Nordisk made no fewer than 260 copies for world-wide distribution. On the

other hand many early American films listed in distributors' catalogues seem to have sold

not more than a couple of copies, and in some cases it may be that none at all were

printed, due to lack of demand.

Since the cinema was from the outset an international business, films had to be shipped

from one country to another, often in different versions. Films might be recorded on two

side-by-side cameras simultaneously, producing two different negatives. Intertitles would

be shot in different languages, and shipped with the prints or a duplicate negative of the

film to a foreign distributor. Sometimes only one frame of each title would be provided, to

be expanded to full length when copies were made, and some films have survived with

only these 'flash titles' or with no titles at all. Sometimes different endings were produced

to suit the tastes of the public in various parts of the world. In eastern Europe for example,

there was a taste for the 'Russian' or tragic ending in preference to the 'happy end'

expected by audiences in America. It was also common to issue coloured prints of a film

for show in luxury theatres and cheaper black and white ones for more modest locales.

Finally, censorship, both national and local, often imposed cuts or other changes in films

at the time of release, and many American films in particular have survived in different

forms as a result of the varied censorship practices of state or city censorship boards.

DECAY

In the early years of the cinema films were looked on as essentially ephemeral and little

attempt was made to preserve them once they reached the end of their commercial life.

The appeal of the Polish scholar Bolesław Matuszewski in 1898 for a permanent archive

of film images to be created to serve as a record for future generations fell on deaf ears,

and it was not until the 1930s that the first film archives were created in a number of

countries to preserve surviving films for posterity. By that time, however, many films had

been irretrievably lost and many others dispersed. The world's archives have now

collected together some 30,000 prints of silent films, but the lack of resources for

cataloguing them means that it is not known how many of these are duplicate prints of the

same version, or, in the case of what appear to be duplicates, whether there are significant

differences between versions of films with the same title. While the number of films

collected continues to rise, the number of surviving films is still probably less than 20 per

cent of those thought to have been made.

Meanwhile, even as the number of rediscovered films rises, a further problem is created

by the perishable nature of the nitrate base on which the vast majority of silent (and early

sound) films were printed. For not only is cellulose nitrate highly flammable, which may

in some cases lead to spontaneous combustion: it is also liable to decay and in the course

of decay it destroys the emulsion which bears the image. Even in the best conservation

conditions (that is to say at very low temperatures and the correct level of humidity), the

nitrate base begins to decompose from the moment it is produced. In the course of the

process the film emits various gases, and in particular nitrous anhydride, which, combined

with air and with the water in the gelatine, produces nitrous and nitric acids. These acids

corrode the silver salts of the emulsion, thereby destroying the image along with its

support, until eventually the whole film is dissolved.

RESTORATION

The decomposition of nitrate film can be slowed down, but not halted. For this reason

film archives are engaged in a struggle to prolong its life until such time as the image can

be transferred to a different support. Unfortunately the cellulose acetate base on to which

the transfer is made is itself liable to eventual decay unless kept under ideal atmospheric

conditions. Even so, it is far more stable than nitrate and infinitely preferable to magnetic

(video) tape, which is not only perishable but is unsuitable for reproducing the character

of the original film. It may be that some time in the future it will prove possible to

preserve film images digitally, but this has not yet been demonstrated to be a practical

possibility.

The aim of restoration is to reproduce the moving image in a form as close as possible to

that in which it was originally shown. But all copies that are made are necessarily

imperfect. For a start, they have had to be duplicated from one base on to another, with an

inevitable loss of some of the original quality. It is also extremely difficult to reproduce

colour techniques such as tinting and toning, even if the film is copied on to colour stock,

which, given the expense, is far from being universal practice. Many films which were

originally coloured are now only seen, if at all, in black and white form.

To appreciate a silent film in the form in which it was originally seen by audiences, it is

necessary to have the rare good luck of seeing an original nitrate print (increasingly

difficult because of modern fire regulations), and even then it has to be recognized that

each copy of a film has its own unique history and every showing will vary according to

which print is being shown and under what conditions. Different projection, different

music, the likely absence of an accompanying live show or light effects, mean that the

modern showing of silent films offers only a rough approximation of what silent film

screening was like for audiences at the time.

Bibliography

Abramson, Albert ( 1987), The History of Television, 1880 to 1941.

Cherchi Paolo Usai ( 1994), Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent

Cinema.

Hampton, Benjamin B. ( 1931), A History of the Movies.

Liesegang, Franz Paul ( 1986), Moving and Projected Images: A Chronology of Pre-

cinema History.

Magliozzi, Ronald S. (ed.) ( 1988), Treasures from the Film Archives.

Rathbun, John B. ( 1914), Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting.

The Loop and the Maltese Cross

The cinema did not really come into being until films could be projected. In this respect

the Kinetoscope, patented by Thomas Alva Edison and W. K. L. Dickson in 1891 and

marketed from 1893, cannot properly be considered cinema, since it consisted only of a

peepshow device through which short films could be viewed by one person at a time. In

the Kinetoscope the film ran continuously past a small shutter, as in Victorial optical toys

such as the Zoetrope, and the flow of light was constructed by the viewer's perceptual

apparatus to form an image of objects in motion - a form of viewing only possible if the

spectator was peering directly into the device. By 1895, however, a number of inventors

were ready with devices in which the film ran intermittently both in the camera and in a

projector, so that an image was held stably in front of the spectator before passing on to

the next one. In the Lumière borthers' Cinématographe, for example (in some versions of

which the same machine doubled as both camera and projector), a metal claw jerked the

film down frame by frame in front of the gate and the film was held steady for the

duration of each image. Since the Lumière films were very short, this form of intermittent

motion did not strain the film too severely.

For longer films, however, or for the regular projection of a sequence of short films, a

method had to be found to ease the passage of the film in front of the gate. By 1896-7,

thanks to the pioneering inventions of Woodville Latham in the United States and R. W.

Paul in Britain, projectors had been developed in which a loop of film was formed at the

gate between two continuouslyrunning sprocket wheels, and only the piece of film held in

the loop was given intermittent motion, thus protecting the film from undue strain. What

then attracted attention was how to find a smoother way of turning the continuous motion

of the camera projector motor into intermittent motion as the film passed the gate. The

solution, again pioneered by R. W. Paul, took the form of a device known as the Maltese

cross. A pin attached to a cam engaged with the little slots between the arms of the cross

as it rotated, and each time it did so the film was drawn forward one frame. The method,

perfected around 1905, remains in use for 35 mm. Projection to this day.

GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH

Early Cinema

ROBERT PEARSON

In the first two decades of its existence the cinema developed rapidly. What in 1895 had

been a mere novelty had by 1913 become an established industry. The earliest films were

little more than moving snapshots, barely one minute in length and often consisting of just

a single shot. By 1905, they were regularly five to ten minutes long and employed

changes of scene and camera position to tell a story or illustrate a theme. Then, in the

early 1910s, with the arrival of the first 'feature-length' films, there gradually emerged a

new set of conventions for handling complex narratives. By this time too, the making and

showing of films had itself become a large-scale business. No longer was the film show a

curiosity sandwiched into a variety of other spectacles, from singing or circus acts to

magic lantern shows. Instead specialist venues had been created, exclusively devoted to

the exhibition of films, and supplied by a number of large production and distribution

companies, based in major cities, who first sold and then increasingly rented films to

exhibitors all over the world. In the course of the 1910s the single most important centre

of supply ceased to be Paris, London, or New York, and became Los Angeles --

Hollywood.

The cinema of this period, from the mid- 1890s to the mid-1910s, is sometimes referred to

as 'pre-Hollywood' cinema, attesting to the growing hegemony of the California-based

American industry after the First World War. It has also been described as pre-classical, in

recognition of the role that a consolidated set of 'classical' narrative conventions was to

play in the world cinema from the 1920s onwards. These terms need to be used with

caution, as they can imply that the cinema of the early years was only there as a precursor

of Hollywood and the classical style which followed. In fact the styles of filmmaking

prevalent in the early years were never entirely displaced by Hollywood or classical

modes, even in America, and many cinemas went on being pre- or at any rate non-

Hollywood in their practices for many years to come. But it remains true that much of the

development that took place in the years from 1906 or 1907 can be seen as laying the

foundation for what was to become the Hollywood system, in both formal and industrial

terms.

For the purposes of this book, therefore, we have divided the period into two. The first

half, from the beginnings up to about 1906, we have simply called early cinema, while the

second half, from 1907 to the mid-1910s, we have designated transitional since it forms a

bridge between the distinctive modes of early cinema and those which came later.

Broadly speaking, the early cinema is distinguished by the use of fairly direct

presentational modes, and draws heavily on existing conventions of photography and

theatre. It is only in the transitional period that specifically cinematic conventions really

start to develop, and the cinema acquires the means of creating its distinctive forms of

narrative illusion.

INDUSTRY

Various nations lay claim to the invention of moving pictures, but the cinema, like so

many other technological innovations, has no precise originating moment and owes its

birth to no particular country and no particular person. In fact, one can trace the origins of

cinema to such diverse sources as sixteenth-century Italian experiments with the camera

obscura, various early nineteenth-century optical toys, and a host of practices of visual

representation such as dioramas and panoramas. In the last decade of the nineteenth

century, efforts to project continuously moving images on to a screen intensified and

inventors/entrepreneurs in several countries presented the 'first' moving pictures to the

marvelling public: Edison in the United States; the Lumière brothers in France; Max

Skladanowsky in Germany; and William Friese-Greene in Great Britain. None of these

men can be called the primary originator of the film medium, however, since only a

favourable conjunction of technical circumstances made such an 'invention' possible at

this particular moment: improvements in photographic development; the invention of

celluloid, the first medium both durable and flexible enough to loop through a projector;

and the application of precision engineering and instruments to projector design.

In spite of the internationalization of both film style and technology, the United States and

a few European countries retained hegemony over film production, distribution, and

exhibition. Initially, French film producers were arguably the most important, if not in

terms of stylistic innovation, an area in which they competed with the British and the

Americans, then certainly in terms of market dominance at home and internationally.

Pride of place must be given to the Lumière brothers, who are frequently, although

perhaps inaccurately, credited with projecting the first moving pictures to a paying

audience. Auguste and Louis Lumière owned a photographic equipment factory and

experimented in their spare time with designing a camera that they dubbed the

Cinématographe. It was first demonstrated on 22 March 1895 at a meeting of the Société

d'Encouragement à l'Industrie Nationale. Subsequent to this prestigious début, the

Lumières continued to publicize their camera as a scientific instrument, exhibiting it at

photographic congresses and conferences of learned societies. In December 1895,

however, they executed their most famous and influential demonstration, projecting ten

films to a paying audience at the Grand Café in Paris.

Precisely dating the first exhibition of moving pictures depends upon whether 'exhibition'

means in private, publicly for a paying audience, seen in a Kinetoscope, or projected on a

screen. Given these parameters, one could date the first showing of motion pictures from

1893, when Edison first perfected the Kinetoscope, to December 1895 and the Lumières'

demonstration at the Grand Café.

The Lumières may not even have been the 'first' to project moving pictures on a screen to

a paying audience; this honour probably belongs to the German Max Skladanowsky, who

had done the same in Berlin two months before the Cinématographe's famed public

exhibition. But despite being 'scooped' by a competitor, the Lumières' business acumen

and marketing skill permitted them to become almost instantly known throughout Europe

and the United States and secured a place for them in film history. The Cinématographe's

technical specifications helped in both regards, initially giving it several advantages over

its competitors in terms of production and exhibition. Its relative lightness (16 lb.

compared to the several hundred of Edison's Kinetograph), its ability to function as a

camera, a projector, and a film developer, and its lack of dependence upon electric current

(it was hand-cranked and illuminated by limelight) all made it extremely portable and

adaptable. During the first six months of the Lumières' operations in the United States,

twenty-one cameramen/projectionists toured the country, exhibiting the Cinématographe

at vaudeville houses and fighting off the primary American competition, the Edison

Kinetograph.

The Lumières' Cinématographe, which showed primarily documentary material,

established French primacy, but their compatriot Georges Mélièlis became the world's

leading producer of fiction films during the early cinema period. Mélièlis began his career

as a conjurer, using magic lanterns as part of his act at the Théâtre RobertHoudin in Paris.

Upon seeing some of the Lumières' films, Mélièlis immediately recognized the potential

of the new medium, although he took it in a very different direction from his more

scientifically inclined countrymen. Mélièlis's Star Film Company began production in

1896, and by the spring of 1897 had its own studio outside Paris in Montreuil. Producing

hundreds of films between 1896 and 1912 and establishing distribution offices in London,

Barcelona, and Berlin by 1902 and in New York by 1903, Mélièlis nearly drove the

Lumières out of business. However, his popularity began to wane in 1908 as the films of

the transitional cinema began to offer a different kind of entertainment and by 1911

virtually the only Mélièlis films released were Westerns produced by Georges's brother

Gaston in a Texas studio. Eventually, competitors forced Mélièlis's company into

bankruptcy in 1913.

Chief among these competitors was the Pathé Company, which outlasted both Mélièlis

and the Lumières. It became one of the most important French film producers during the

early period, and was primarily responsible for the French dominance of the early cinema

market. PathéFrères was founded in 1896 by Charles Pathé, who followed an aggressive

policy of acquisition and expansion, acquiring the Lumières' patents as early as 1902, and

the Mélièlis Film Company before the First World War. Pathé also expanded his

operations abroad, exploiting markets. ignored by other distributors, and making his

firm's name practically synonymous with the cinema in many Third World countries. He

created subsidiary production companies in many European nations: Hispano Film

( Spain); Pathé-Russe ( Russia); Film d'Arte Italiano; and PathéBritannia. In 1908 Pathé

distributed twice as many films in the United States as all the indigenous manufacturers

combined. Despite this initial French dominance, however, various American studios,

primary among them the Edison Manufacturing Company, the American Mutoscope and

Biograph Company of America (after 1909 simply the Biograph Company), and the

Vitagraph Company of America (all founded in the late 1890s) had already created a solid

basis for their country's future domination of world cinema.

The 'invention' of the moving picture is often associated with the name of Thomas Alva

Edison, but, in accordance with contemporary industrial practices, Edison's moving

picture machines were actually produced by a team of technicians working at his

laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, supervised by the Englishman William Kennedy

Laurie Dickson. Dickson and his associates began working on moving pictures in 1889

and by 1893 had built the Kinetograph, a workable but bulky camera, and the

Kinetoscope, a peep-show-like viewing machine in which a continuous strip of film

between 40 and 50 feet long ran between an electric lamp and a shutter. They also

developed and built the first motion picture studio, necessitated by the Kinetograph's size,

weight, and relative immobility. This was a shack whose resemblance to a police van

caused it to be popularly dubbed the 'Black Maria'. To this primitive studio came the

earliest American film actors, mainly vaudeville performers who travelled to West Orange

from nearby New York City to have their (moving) pictures taken. These pictures lasted

anywhere from fifteen seconds to one minute and simply reproduced the various

performers' stage acts with, for example, Little Egypt, the famous belly-dancer, dancing,

or Sandow the Strongman posing.

An early poster for the 'Cinématographe' with, on screen, the Lumière film Watering the Gardener ( L'Arroseur arrosé, 1895)

As with the Lumières, Edison's key position in film history stems more from marketing

skill than technical ingenuity. His company was the first to market a commercially viable

moving picture machine, albeit one designed for individual viewers rather than mass

audiences. Controlling the rights to the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, Edison

immediately embarked upon plans for commercial exploitation, entering into business

agreements that led to the establishment of Kinetoscope parlours around the country. The

first Kinetoscope parlour, a rented store-front with room for ten of the viewing machines

each showing a different film, opened in New York City in April 1894. The new technical

marvel received a promotional boost when the popular boxing champion Gentleman Jim

Corbett went six rounds against Pete Courtney at the Black Maria. The resulting film

gained national publicity for Edison's machine, as well as drawing the rapt attention of

female viewers, who reportedly formed lines at the Kinetoscope parlours to sneak a peek

at the scantily clad Gentleman Jim. Soon other Kinetoscope parlours opened and the

machines also became a featured attraction at summer amusement parks.

Until the spring of 1896 the Edison Company devoted itself to shooting films for the

Kinetoscope, but, as the novelty of the Kinetoscope parlours wore off and sales of the

machines fell off, Thomas Edison began to rethink his commitment to individually

oriented exhibition. He acquired the patents to a projector whose key mechanism had

been designed by Thomas Armat and C. Francis Jenkins, who had lacked the capital for

the commercial exploitation of their invention. The Vitascope, which projected an image

on to a screen, was advertised under Edison's name and premièred in New York City in

April of 1896. Six films were shown, five produced by the Edison Company and one,

Rough Sea at Dover, by the Englishman R. W. Paul. These brief films, 40 feet in length

and lasting twenty seconds, were spliced end to end to form a loop, enabling each film to

be repeated up to half a dozen times. The sheer novelty of moving pictures, rather than

their content or a story, was the attraction for the first film audiences. Within a year there

were several hundred Vitascopes giving shows in various locations throughout the United

States.

In these early years Edison had two chief domestic rivals. In 1898 two former

vaudevillians, James Stuart Blackton and Albert Smith, founded the Vitagraph Company

of America initially to make films for exhibition in conjunction with their own vaudeville

acts. In that same year the outbreak of the Spanish-American War markedly increased the

popularity of the new moving pictures, which were able to bring the war home more

vividly than the penny press and the popular illustrated weeklies. Blackton and Smith

immediately took advantage of the situation, shooting films on their New York City

rooftop studio that purported to show events taking place in Cuba. So successful did this

venture prove that by 1900 the partners issued their first catalogue offering films for sale

to other exhibitors, thus establishing Vitagraph as one of the primary American film

producers. The third important American studio of the time, the American Mutoscope and

Biograph Company, now primarily known for employing D. W. Griffith between 1908

and 1913, was formed in 1895 to produce flipcards for Mutoscope machines. When W. K.

L. Dickson left Edison to join Biograph, the company used his expertise to patent a

projector to compete with the Vitascope. This projector apparently gave betterquality

projection with less flicker than other machines and quickly replaced the Lumières as

Edison's chief competitor. In 1897 Biograph also began to produce films but the Edison

Company effectively removed them from the market by entangling them in legal disputes

that remained unresolved until 1902.

At the turn of the century, Britain was the third important film-producing country. The

Edison Kinetoscope was first seen there in October 1894, but, because of Edison's

uncharacteristic failure to patent the device abroad, the Englishman R. W. Paul legally

copied the non-protected viewing machine and installed fifteen Kinetoscopes at the

exhibition hall at Earl's Court in London. When Edison belatedly sought to protect his

interests by cutting off the supply of films, Paul responded by going into production for

himself. In 1899, in conjunction with Birt Acres, who supplied the necessary technical

expertise, Paul opened the first British film studio, in north London. Another important

early British film-maker, Cecil Hepworth, built a studio in his London back garden in

1900. By 1902 Brighton had also become an important centre for British filmmaking with

two of the key members of the so-called 'Brighton school', George Albert Smith and

James Williamson, each operating a studio.

At this time, production, distribution, and exhibition practices differed markedly from

those that were to emerge during the transitional period; the film industry had not yet

attained the specialization and division of labour characteristic of large-scale capitalist

enterprises. Initially, production, distribution, and exhibition all remained the exclusive

province of the film manufacturers. The Lumière travelling cameramen used the

adaptable Cinématographe to shoot, develop, and project films, while American studios

such as Edison and Biograph usually supplied a projector, films, and even a projectionist

to the vaudeville houses that constituted the primary exhibition sites. Even with the rapid

emergence of independent travelling showmen in the United States, Britain, and

Germany, film distribution remained nonexistent. Producers sold rather than rented their

films; a practice which forestalled the development of permanent exhibition sites until the

second decade of the cinema's history.

As opposed to the strict division of labour and assemblyline practices that characterized

the Hollywood studios, production during this period was non-hierarchical and truly

collaborative. One of the most important early film 'directors' was Edwin S. Porter, who

had worked as a hired projectionist and then as an independent exhibitor. Porter joined the

Edison Company in 1900, first as a mechanic and then as head of production. Despite his

nominal position, Porter only controlled the technical aspects of filming and editing while

other Edison employees with theatrical experience took charge of directing the actors and

the mise-en-scène. Other American studios seem to have practised similar arrangements.

At Vitagraph, James Stuart Blackton and Albert Smith traded off their duties in front of

and behind the camera, one acting and the other shooting, and then reversing their roles

for the next film. In similar fashion, the members of the British Brighton school both

owned their production companies and functioned as cameramen. Georges Mélièlis, who

also owned his own company, did everything short of actually crank the camera, writing

the script, designing sets and costumes, devising trick effects, and often acting. The first

true 'director', in the modern sense of being responsible for all aspects of a film's actual

shooting, was probably introduced at the Biograph Company in 1903. The increased

production of fiction films required that one person have a sense of the film's narrative

development and of the connections between individual shots.

STYLE

As the emergence of the film director illustrates, changes in the film texts often

necessitated concomitant changes in the production process. But what did the earliest

films actually look like? Generally speaking, until 1907, filmmakers concerned

themselves with the individual shot, preserving the spatial aspects of the pro-filmic event

(the scene that takes place in front of the camera). They did not create temporal relations

or story causality by using cinematic interventions. They set the camera far enough from

the action to show the entire length of the human body as well as the spaces above the

head and below the feet. The camera was kept stationary, particularly in exterior shots,

with only occasional reframings to follow the action, and interventions through such

devices as editing or lighting were infrequent. This long-shot style is often referred to as a

tableau shot or a proscenium arch shot, the latter appellation stemming from the supposed

resemblance to the perspective an audience member would have from the front row centre

of a theatre. For this reason, pre-1907 film is often accused of being more theatrical than

cinematic, although the tableau style also replicates the perspective commonly seen in

such other period media as postcards and stereographs, and early film-makers derived

their inspiration as much from these and other visual texts as from the theatre.

Concerning themselves primarily with the individual shot, early film-makers tended not

to be overly interested in connections between shots; that is, editing. They did not

elaborate conventions for linking one shot to the next, for constructing a continuous linear

narrative, nor for keeping the viewer oriented in time and space. However, there were

some multi-shot films produced during this period, although rarely before 1902. In fact,

one can break the pre-1907 years into two subsidiary periods: 18941902/3, when the

majority of films consisted of one shot and were what we would today call

documentaries, known then, after the French usage, as actualities; and 19037, when the

multi-shot, fiction film gradually began to dominate, with simple narratives structuring

the temporal and causal relations between shots.

Many films of the 1894-1907 period seem strange from a modern perspective, since early

film-makers tended to be quite self-conscious in their narrative style, presenting their

films to the viewer as if they were carnival barkers touting their wares, rather than

disguising their presence through cinematic conventions as their successors were to do.

Unlike the omniscient narrators of realist novels and the Hollywood cinema, the early

cinema restricted narrative to a single point of view. For this reason, the early cinema

evoked a different relationship between the spectator and the screen, with viewers more

interested in the cinema as visual spectacle than as story-teller. So striking is the emphasis

upon spectacle during this period that many scholars have accepted Tom Gunning's

distinction between the early cinema as a 'cinema of attractions' and the transitional

cinema as a 'cinema of narrative integration' ( Gunning, 1986 ). In the 'cinema of attractions', the viewer created meaning not through the interpretation of cinematic

conventions but through previously held information related to the pro-filmic event: ideas

of spatial coherence; the unity of an event with a recognizable beginning and end; and

knowledge of the subject-matter. During the transitional period, films began to require the

viewer to piece together a story predicated upon a knowledge of cinematic conventions.

1894-1902/3

The work of the two most important French producers of this period, the Lumières and

Mélièlis, provides an example of the textual conventions of the one-shot film. Perhaps the

most famous of the films that the Lumières showed in December 1895 is A Train Arriving

at a Station ( L'Arrivé d'un train en gare de la Ciotat), which runs for about fifty seconds.

A stationary camera shows a train pulling into a station and the passengers disembarking,

the film continuing until most of them have exited the shot. Apocryphal tales persist that

the onrushing cinematic train so terrified audience members that they ducked under their

seats for protection. Another of the Lumières' films, Workers Leaving the Lumière

Factory ( Sortie d'usine), had a less terrifying effect upon its audience. An eye-level

camera, set far enough back from the action to show not only the full-length figures of the

workers but the high garage-like door through which they exit, observes as the door opens

and disgorges the building's occupants, who disperse to either side of the frame. The film

ends roughly at the point when all the workers have left. Contemporary accounts indicate

that these and other Lumière films fascinated their audiences not by depicting riveting

events, but through incidental details that a modern viewer may find almost unnoticeable:

the gentle movement of the leaves in the background as a baby eats breakfast; the play of

light on the water as a boat leaves the harbour. The first film audiences did not demand to

be told stories, but found infinite fascination in the mere recording and reproduction of

the movement of animate and inanimate objects.

Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery ( 1903)

work, which depicted events that might have taken place even in the camera's absence,

this famous film stages action specifically for the moving pictures. A gardener waters a

lawn, a boy steps on the hose, halting the flow of water, the gardener peers questioningly

at the spigot, the boy removes his foot, and the restored stream of water douses the

gardener, who chases, catches, and spanks the boy. The film is shot with a stationary

camera in the standard tableau style of the period. At a key point in the action the boy,

trying to escape chastisement, exits the frame and the gardener follows, leaving the screen

blank for two seconds. A modern film-maker would pan the camera to follow the

characters or cut to the offscreen action, but the Lumières did neither, providing an

emblematic instance of the preservation of the space of the pro-filmic event taking

precedence over story causality or temporality.

Unlike the Lumières, Georges Mélièlis always shot in his studio, staging action for the

camera, his films showing fantastical events that could not happen in 'real life'. Although

all Mélièlis's films conform to the standard period tableau style, they are also replete with

magical appearances and disappearances, achieved through what cinematographers call

'stop action', that is, stopping the camera, having the actor enter or exit the shot, and then

starting the camera again to create the illusion that a character has simply vanished or

materialized. Mélièlis's films have played a key part in film scholars' debates over the

supposed theatricality of early cinematic style. Whereas scholars had previously thought

that stop action effects required no editing and hence concluded that Méliès's films were

simply 'filmed theatre', examination of the actual negatives reveals that substitution

effects were, in fact, produced through splicing or editing. Mélièlis also manipulated the

image through the superimposition of one shot over another so that many of the films

represent space in a manner more reminiscent of photographic devices developed during

the nineteenth century than of the theatre. Films such as L'Homme orchestre ( The One-

Man Band, 1900) or Le Mélomane ( The Melomaniac, 1903) showcased the cinematic

multiplication of a single image (in these cases of Mélièlis himself) achieved through the

layering of one shot over another.

Despite this cinematic manipulation of the pro-filmic space, Mélièlis's films remain in

many ways excessively theatrical, presenting a story as if it were being performed on a

stage, a characteristic they have in common with many of the fiction films of the pre-1907

period. Not only does the camera replicate the proscenium arch perspective, but the films

stage their action in a shallow playing space between the painted flats and the front of the

'stage', and characters enter or exit either from the wings or through traps. Mélièlis

boasted, in a 1907 article, that his studio's shooting area replicated a theatrical stage

'constructed exactly like one in a theatre and fitted with trapdoors, scenery slots, and

uprights'.

For many years film theorists pointed to the Lumière and Mélièlis films as the originating

moment of the distinction between documentary and fiction film-making, given that the

Lumières for the most part filmed 'real' events and Mélièlis staged events. But such

distinctions were not a part of contemporary discourse, since many pre-1907 films mixed

what we would today call 'documentary' material, that is, events or objects existing

independently of the film-maker, with 'fictional' material, that is, events or objects

specifically fabricated for the camera. Take, for example, one of the rare multi-shot films

of the period, The Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison ( Edison,

1901), a compilation of four self-contained individual shots dealing with the execution of

the assassin of President William McKinley. The first two shots are panoramas of the

exterior of the prison, the third shows an actor portraying the condemned man in his cell,

and the fourth re-enacts his electrocution. Given films of this kind, it is more useful to

discuss very early genres in terms of similarities of subject-matters rather than in terms of

an imposed distinction between fiction and documentary.

Many turn-of-the-century films reflected the period's fascination with travel and

transportation. The train film, established by the Lumières, practically became a genre of

its own. Each studio released a version, sometimes shooting a moving train from a

stationary camera and sometimes positioning a camera on the front of or inside the train

to produce a travelling shot, since the illusion of moving through space seemed to thrill

early audiences. The train genre related to the travelogue, films featuring scenes both

exotic and familiar, and replicating in motion the immensely popular postcards and

stereographs of the period. Public events, such as parades, world's fairs, and funerals, also

provided copious material for early cameramen. Both the travelogue and the public event

film consisted of self-contained, individual shots, but producers did offer combinations of

these films for sale together with suggestions for their projection order, so that, for

example, an exhibitor could project several discrete shots of the same event, and so give

his audience a fuller and more varied picture of it. Early film-makers also replicated

popular amusements, such as vaudeville acts and boxing matches, that could be relatively

easily reenacted for the camera. The first Kinetoscope films in 1894 featured vaudeville

performers, including contortionists, performing animals, and dancers, as well as scenes

from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Again, the shots functioned as self-contained units

and were marketed as such, but exhibitors had the option of putting them together to form

an evening's entertainment. By 1897 the popular filmed boxing matches could potentially

run for an hour. The same was true of another of the most popular of early genres, Passion

plays telling the life of Christ, which were often filmed recordings of theatrical

companies' performances. A compilation of shots of the play's key events could last well

over an hour. A third group of films told one-shot mini-narratives, most often of a

humorous nature. Some were gag films, resembling the Lumières' Watering the Gardener,

in which the comic action takes place in the pro-filmic event, as for instance in Elopement

by Horseback ( Edison, 1891), where a young man seeking to elope with his sweetheart

engages in a wrestling match with the girl's father. Others relied for their humour upon

trick effects such as stop action, superimposition, and reverse action. The most famous are

the Mélièlis films, but this form was also seen in some of the early films made by Porter

for the Edison Company and by the film-makers of the English Brighton school. These

films became increasingly complicated, sometimes involving more than one shot. In

Williamson's film The Big Swallow ( 1901), the first shot shows a photographer about to

take a picture of a passer-by. The second shot replicates the photographer's viewpoint

through the camera lens, and shows the passerby's head growing bigger and bigger as he

approaches the camera. The man's mouth opens and the film cuts to a shot of the

photographer and his camera falling into a black void. The film ends with a shot of the

passer-by walking away munching contentedly.

1902/3-1907

In this period, the multi-shot film emerged as the norm rather than the exception, with

films no longer treating the individual shot as a self-contained unit of meaning but linking

one shot to another. However, film-makers may have been using a succession of shots to

capture and emphasize the highpoints of the action rather than construct either a linear

narrative causality or clearly establish temporal-spatial relations. As befits the 'cinema of

attractions', the editing was intended to enhance visual pleasure rather than to refine

narrative developments.

One of the strangest editing devices used in this period was overlapping action, which

resulted from film-makers' desire both to preserve the pro-filmic space and to emphasize

the important action by essentially showing it twice. Georges Mélièli's A Trip to the

Moon, perhaps the most famous film of 1902, covers the landing of a space capsule on

the moon in two shots. In the first, taken from 'space', the capsule hits the man in the

moon in the eye, and his expression changes from a grin to a grimace. In the second shot,

taken from the 'moon's surface', the capsule once again lands. These two shots, which

show the same event twice, can disconcert a modern viewer. This repetition of action

around a cut can be seen in an American film of the same year, How They Do Things on

the Bowery, directed by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Manufacturing Company. An irate

waiter ejects a customer unable to pay his bill. In an interior shot the waiter throws the

man out and hurls his suitcase after him. In the following exterior shot, the customer

emerges from the restaurant followed closely by his suitcase. In a 1904 Biograph film The

Widow and the Only Man, overlapping action is used not to cover interior and exterior

events but to show the same event a second time in closer scale. In the first shot a woman

accepts her suitor's flowers and smells them appreciatively. Then, rather than a'match cut',

in which the action picks up at the beginning of the second shot from where it left off at

the end of the first, as would be dictated by present-day conventions, a closer shot shows

her repeating precisely the same action.

While overlapping action was a common means of linking shots, film-makers during this

period also experimented with other methods of establishing spatial and temporal

relations. One sees an instance of this in Trip to the Moon: having landed on the moon,

the intrepid French explorers encounter unfriendly extraterrestrials (who remarkably

resemble those 'hostile natives' the French were encountering in their colonies at this very

time!). The explorers flee to their spaceship and hurry back to the safety of Earth, their

descent covered in four shots and twenty seconds of film time. In the first shot, the

capsule leaves the moon, exiting at the bottom of the frame. In the second shot, the

capsule moves from the top of the frame to the bottom of the frame. In the third the

capsule moves from the top of the frame to the water, and in the fourth the capsule moves

from the water's surface to the sea-bed. This sequence is filmed much as it might be today,

with the movement of the spaceship following the convention of directional continuity,

that is, an object or a character should appear to continue moving in the same direction

from shot to shot, the consistent movement serving to establish the spatial and temporal

relationships between individual shots. But while a modern film-maker would cut directly

from shot to shot, Mélièlis dissolved from shot to shot, a transitional device that now

implies a temporal ellipsis. In this regard, then, the sequence can still be confusing for a

modern viewer.

Linking shots through dissolves was not in fact unusual in this period, and one can see

another example in Alice in Wonderland ( Hepworth, 1903). However, another English

film-maker, James Williamson, a member of the Brighton school, made two films in

1901, Stop Thief! and Fire!, in which direct cuts continue the action from shot to shot.

Stop Thief! shows a crowd chasing a tramp who has stolen a joint from a butcher,

motivating connections by the diagonal movement of characters through each of the

individual shots; the thief and then his pursuers entering the frame at the back and exiting

the frame past the camera. The fact that the camera remains with the scene until the last

character has exited reveals how character movement motivates the editing. Film-makers

found this editing device so effective that an entire genre of chase films arose, such as

Personal ( Biograph, 1904), in which would-be brides pursue a wealthy Frenchman. Many

films also incorporated a chase into their narratives, as did the famous 'first' Western The

Great Train Robbery ( Edison, 1903), in which the posse pursues the bandits for several

shots in the fllm's second half.

Early editing: two adjacent shots from G. A. Smith's As Seen through a Telescope ( 1900). The view through the telescope (achieved

by using a mask) shows a girl's ankle being stroked, thereby 'explaining' the previous shot

In Fire!, Williamson uses a similar editing strategy to that employed in Stop Thief!, the

movement of a policeman between shots 1 and 2 and the movement of fire engines

between shots 2 and 3 establishing spatial-temporal relations. But in the film's fourth and

fifth shots, where other film-makers might have used overlapping action, Williamson

experiments with a cut on movement that bears a strong resemblance to what is now

called a match cut. Shot 4, an interior, shows a fireman coming through the window of a

room in a burning house and rescuing the inhabitant. Shot 5 is an exterior of the burning

house and begins as the fireman and the rescued victim emerge through the window.

Although the continuity is 'imperfect' from a modern perspective, the innovation is

considerable. In his 1902 film Life of An American Fireman, undoubtedly influenced by

Fire!, Porter still employed overlapping action, showing a similar rescue in its entirety

first from the interior and then from the exterior perspective. A year later, however,

Williamson's compatriot G. A. Smith also created an 'imperfect' match cut, The Sick

Kitten ( 1903), cutting from a long view of two children giving a kitten medicine to a

closer view of the kitten licking the spoon.

During this period, film-makers also experimented with cinematically fracturing the space

of the pro-filmic event, primarily to enhance the viewers' visual pleasure through a closer

shot of the action rather than to emphasize details necessary for narrative comprehension.

The Great Train Robbery includes a medium shot of the outlaw leader, Barnes, firing his

revolver directly at the camera, which in modern prints usually concludes the film. The

Edison catalogue, however, informed exhibitors that the shot could come at the beginning

or the end of the film. Narratively non-specific shots of this nature became quite common,

as in the British film Raid on a Coiner's Den ( Alfred Collins , 1904), which begins with a

close-up insert of three hands coming into the frame from different directions, one

holding a pistol, another a pair of handcuffs, and a third forming a clenched fist. In

Porter's own oneshot film Photographing a Female Crook, a moving camera produces the

closer view as it dollies into a woman contorting her face to prevent the police from

taking an accurate mug shot.

Even shots that approximate the point of view of a character within the fiction, and which

are now associated with the externalization of thoughts and emotions, were then there

more to provide visual pleasure than narrative information. In yet another example of the

innovative film-making of the Brighton school, Grandma's Reading Glasses ( G. A.

Smith, Warwick Trading Company, 1900), a little boy looks through his grandmother's

spectacles at a variety of objects, a watch, a canary, and a kitten, which the film shows in

inserted close-ups. In The Gay Shoe Clerk ( Edison/ Porter, 1903) a shoeshop assistant

flirts with his female customer. A cut-in approximates his view of her ankle as she raises

her skirt in tantalizing fashion. This close-up insert is an example not only of the visual

pleasure afforded by the 'cinema of attractions' but of the early cinema's voyeuristic

treatment of the female body. Despite the fact that their primary purpose is not to

emphasize narrative developments, these shots' attribution to a character in the film

distinguishes them from the totally unmotivated closer views in The Great Train Robbery

and Raid on a Coiner's Den.

The editing strategies of the pre- 1907 'cinema of attractions'were primarily designed to

enhance visual pleasure rather than to tell a coherent, linear narrative. But many of these

films did tell simple stories and audiences undoubtedly derived narrative, as well as

visual, pleasure. Despite the absence of internal strategies to construct spatial-temporal

relations and linear narratives, the original audiences made sense of these films, even

though modern viewers can find them all but incoherent. This is because the films of the

'cinema of attractions' relied heavily on their audiences' knowledge of other texts, from

which the films were directly derived or indirectly related. Early film-makers did learn

how to make meaning in a new medium, but were not working in a vacuum. The cinema

had deep roots in the rich popular culture of the age, drawing heavily during its infant

years upon the narrative and visual conventions of other forms of popular entertainment.

The pre-1907 cinema has been accused of being 'non-cinematic' and overly theatrical, and

indeed film-makers like Mélièlis were heavily influenced by nondramatic theatrical

practices, but for the most part lengthy theatrical dramas provided an inappropriate model

for a medium that began with films of less than a minute, and only became an important

source of inspiration as films grew longer during the transitional period. As the first

Edison Kinetoscope films illustrate, vaudeville, with its variety format of unrelated acts

and lack of concern for developed stories, constituted a very important source material

and the earliest film-makers relied upon media such as the melodrama and pantomime

(emphasizing visual effects rather than dialogue), magic lanterns, comics, political

cartoons, newspapers, and illustrated song slides.

Magic lanterns, early versions of slide projectors often lit by kerosene lamps, proved a

particularly important influence upon films, for magic lantern practices permitted the

projection of 'moving pictures', which set precedents for the cinematic representation of

time and space. Magic lanterns employed by travelling exhibitors often had elaborate

lever and pulley mechanisms to produce movement within specially manufactured slides.

Long slides pulled slowly through the slide holder produced the equivalent of a cinematic

pan. Two slide holders mounted on the same lantern permitted the operator to produce a

dissolve by switching rapidly between slides. The use of two slides also permitted

'editing', as operators could cut from long shots to close-ups, exteriors to interiors, and

from characters to what they were seeing. Grandma's Reading Glasses, in fact, derives

from a magic lantern show. Magic lantern lectures given by travelling exhibitors such as

the Americans Burton Holmes and John Stoddard provided precedents for the train and

travelogue films, the lantern illustrations often intercutting exterior views of the train,

interior views of the traveller in the train, and views of scenery and of interesting

incidents.

In addition to mimicking the visual conventions of other media, film-makers derived

many of their films from stories already well known to the audience. Edison advertised its

Night before Christmas ( Porter, 1905) by saying the film 'closely follows the time-

honored Christmas legend by Clement Clarke Moore'. Both Biograph and Edison made

films of the hit song 'Everybody Works but Father'. Vitagraph based its Happy Hooligan

series on a cartoon tramp character whose popular comic strip ran in several New York

newspaper Sunday supplements. Many early films presented synoptic versions of fairly

complex narratives, their producers presumably depending upon their audiences'pre-

existing knowledge of the subject-matter rather than upon cinematic conventions for the

requisite narrative coherence. L'Épopée napoléonienne ('The Epic of Napoleon', 1903-4

Pathé) presents Napoleon's life through a series of tableaux, drawing upon well-known

historical incidents (the coronation, the burning of Moscow) and anecdotes ( Napoleon

standing guard for the sleeping sentry) but with no attempt at causal linear connection or

narrative development among its fifteen shots. In similar fashion, multi-shot films such as

Ten Nights in a Barroom ( Biograph, 1903) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (Vitagraph, 1903)

presented only the highlights of these familiar and oftperformed melodramas, with shot

connections provided not by editing strategies but by the audiences' knowledge of

intervening events. The latter film, however, appears to be one of the earliest to have

intertitles. These title cards, summarizing the action of the shot which followed, appeared

at the same time as the multi-shot film, around 1903-4, and seem to indicate a recognition

on the part of the producers of the necessity for internally rather than externally derived

narrative coherence.

EXHIBITION

Cinema initially existed not as a popular commercial medium but as a scientific and

educational novelty. The cinematic apparatus itself and its mere ability to reproduce

movement constituted the attraction, rather than any particular film. In many countries,

moving picture machines were first seen at world's fairs and scientific expositions: the

Edison Company had planned to début its Kinetoscope at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair

although it failed to assemble the machines in time, and moving picture machines were

featured in several areas of the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris.

Fairly rapidly, cinema exhibition was integrated into pre-existing venues of 'popular

culture' and 'refined culture', although the establishment of venues specifically for the

exhibition of films did not come until 1905 in the United States and a little later

elsewhere. In the United States, films were shown in the popular vaudeville houses,

which by the turn of the century catered to a reasonably well-to-do audience willing to

pay 25 cents for an afternoon or evening's entertainment. Travelling showmen, who

lectured on educational topics, toured with their own projectors and showed films in local

churches and operahouses, charging audiences in large metropolitan areas the same $2

that it cost to see a Broadway show. Cheaper and more popular venues included tent

shows, set up at fairs and carnivals, and temporarily rented store-fronts, the forerunners of

the famous nickelodeons. Early film audiences in the United States, therefore, tended to

be quite heterogeneous, and dominated by no one class.

Early exhibition in Britain, as in most European countries, followed a similar pattern to

the United States, with primary exhibition venues being fairgrounds, music halls, and

disused shops. Travelling showmen played a crucial role in establishing the popularity of

the new medium, making films an important attraction at fairgrounds. Given that fairs and

music halls attracted primarily working-class patrons, early film audiences in Britain, as

well as on the Continent, had a more homogeneous class base than in the United States.

An early travelling cinema: Green's Cinematograph Show, Glasgow, 1898

Wherever films were shown, and whoever saw them, the exhibitor during this period

often had as much control over the films' meanings as did the producers themselves. Until

the advent of multi-shot films and intertitles, around 1903-4, the producers supplied the

individual units but the exhibitor put together the programme, and single-shot films

permitted decision-making about the projection order and the inclusion of other material

such as lantern slide images and title cards. Some machines facilitated this process by

combining moving picture projection with a stereopticon, or lantern slide projector,

allowing the exhibitor to make a smooth transition between film and slides. In New York

City, the Eden Musée put together a special show on the Spanish-American War, using

lantern slides and twenty or more films from different producers. While still primarily an

exhibitor, Cecil Hepworth suggested interspersing lantern slides with films and 'stringing

the pictures together into little sets or episodes' with commentary linking the material

together. When improvements in the projector permitted showing films that lasted more

than fifty seconds, exhibitors began splicing twelve or more films together to form

programmes on particular subjects. Not only could exhibitors manipulate the visual

aspects of their programmes, they also added sound of various kinds, for, contrary to

popular opinion, the silent cinema was never silent. At the very least, music, from the full

orchestra to solo piano, accompanied all films shown in the vaudeville houses. Travelling

exhibitors lectured over the films and lantern slides they projected, the spoken word

capable of imposing a very different meaning on the image from the one that the producer

may have intended. Many exhibitors even added sound effects -- horses' hooves, revolver

shots, and so forth-and spoken dialogue delivered by actors standing behind the screen.

By the end of its first decade of existence, the cinema had established itself as an

interesting novelty, one distraction among many in the increasingly frenetic pace of

twentieth-century life. Yet the fledgeling medium was still very much dependent upon

pre-existing media for its formal conventions and story-telling devices, upon somewhat

outmoded individually-driven production methods, and upon pre-existing exhibition

venues such as vaudeville and fairs. In its next decade, however, the cinema took major

steps toward becoming the mass medium of the twentieth century, complete with its own

formal conventions, industry structure, and exhibition venues.

Bibliography

Balio, Tino (ed.) ( 1985), The American Film Industry.

Barnes, John ( 1976). The Beginnings of the Cinema in England.

Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), The Classical Hollywood

Cinema.

Chanan, Michael ( 1980), The Dream that Kicks.

Cherchi Paolo Usai, and Codelli, Lorenzo (eds.) ( 1990), Before Caligari.

Cosandey, Roland, Gaudreault, André, and Gunning, Tom (eds.) ( 1992), Une invention

du diable?

Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.) ( 1990), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative.

Fell, John L. ( 1983), Film before Griffith.

--- ( 1986), Film and the Narrative Tradition.

Gunning, Tom ( 1986), "The Cinema of Attractions".

Holman, Roger (ed.) ( 1982), Cinema 1900-1906: An Analytic Study.

Low, Rachael, and Manvell, Roger ( 1948), The History of the British Film, 1896-1906.

Musser, Charles ( 1990), The Emergence of Cinema.

--- ( 1991), Before the Nickelodeon.

Transitional Cinema

ROBERTA PEARSON

Between 1907 and 1913 the organization of the film industry in the United States and

Europe began to emulate contemporary industrial capitalist enterprises. Specialization

increased as production, distribution, and exhibition became separate and distinct areas,

although some producers, particularly in the United States, did attempt to establish

oligopolistic control over the entire industry. The greater length of films, coupled with the

unrelenting demand from exhibitors for a regular infusion of new product, required this

standardization of production practices, as well as an increased division of labour and the

codification of cinematic conventions. The establishment of permanent exhibition sites

aided the rationalization of distribution and exhibition procedures as well as maximizing

profits, which put the industry on a more stable footing. In most countries, early cinemas

held fairly small audiences, and profits depended upon a rapid turnover, necessitating

short programmes and frequent changes of fare. This situation encouraged producers to

make short, standardized films to meet the constant demand. This demand was enhanced

through the construction of a star system patterned after the theatrical model which

guaranteed the steady loyalty of the newly emerging mass audience.

The films of this period, often referred to as the 'cinema of narrative integration', no

longer relied upon viewers' extra-textual knowledge but rather employed cinematic

conventions to create internally coherent narratives. The average film reached a standard

length of a 1000-foot reel and ran for about fifteen minutes, although the so-called 'feature

film', running an hour or more, also made its first appearance during these years. In

general, the emergence of the 'cinema of narrative integration' coincided with the cinema's

move toward the cultural mainstream and its establishment as the first truly mass

medium. Film companies responded to pressures from state and civic organizations with

internal censorship schemes and other strategies that gained both films and film industry a

degree of social respectability.

INDUSTRY

Before the First World War, European film industries dominated the international market,

with France, Italy, and Denmark the strongest exporters. From 60 to 70 per cent of all the

films imported into the United States and Europe were French. Pathé, the strongest of the

French studios, had been forced into aggressive expansion by the relatively small

domestic demand. It established offices in major cities around the world, supplemented

them with travelling salesmen who sold films and equipment, and, as a result, dominated

the market in countries that could support only one film company.

US producers faced strong competition from European product within their own country

for, despite the proliferation of relatively successful motion picture manufacturers during

the transitional years, a high percentage of films screened in the USA still originated in

Europe. Pathé opened a US office in 1904, and by 1907 other foreign firms, British and

Italian among them, were entering the US market on a regular basis. Many of these

distributed their product through the Kleine Optical Company, the major importer of

foreign films into the United States during these years and a company that played a

prominent role in the transition to the longer feature film. In 1907 French firms,

particularly Pathé, controlled the American market, sharing it with other European

countries: of the 1,200 films released in the United States that year only about 400 were

domestic. The American film industry took note of this, and the trade press, established in

this year with Moving Picture World, often complained about the inferior quality of the

imports, criticizing films that dealt with contemporary topics for their narrative

incomprehensibility and, worse yet, un-American morals.

Pathé Frères' glass-topped studio at Vincennes, in 1906

Paradoxically, an earlier move to rationalize film distribution had resulted in a

maximization of profits, and as a result US manufacturers initially concentrated on the

domestic market. However, during these years they began a campaign of international

expansion that resulted in their being well placed to step into the number one position in

1914, when European film industries were reeling from the effects of the outbreak of war.

In 1907 Vitagraph became the first of the major US firms to establish overseas

distribution offices, and in 1909 other American producers established agencies in

London, which remained the European centre for American distribution until 1916. As a

result the British industry tended to concentrate on distribution and exhibition rather than

production, conceding American dominance in this area. American films constituted at

least half of those shown in Britain with Italian and French imports making up a

substantial portion of the rest. Germany, which also lacked a wellestablished industry of

its own, was the second most profitable market for American films. In the pre-war years,

however, American firms lacked the strength to compete with the powerful French and

Italian industries in their own countries. American films were distributed outside Europe,

but often not to the financial benefit of the production studios, who granted their British

distributors the rights not only to the British Isles and some Continental countries but to

British colonies as well.

During this period American film production took place mainly on the east coast, with an

outpost or two in Chicago and some companies making occasional forays to the west

coast and even to foreign locations. New York City was the headquarters of three of the

most important American companies: Edison had a studio in the Bronx, Vitagraph in

Brooklyn, and Biograph in the heart of the Manhattan show-business district on

Fourteenth Street. Other companies -- Solax and American Pathé among them -- had

studios across the Hudson in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which also served as a prime location

for many of the New York based companies. The Great Train Robbery ( Edison, 1903)

was only one of the many ' Jersey' Westerns shot in the vicinity. So over-used were certain

settings that a contemporary anecdote claimed that two companies once shot on either

side of a Fort Lee fence, sharing the same gate. Chicago served as headquarters for the

Selig and Essanay studios and for George Kleine's distribution company. Many studios

sent companies to California during the winter to take advantage of the superior locations

and shooting conditions, and Selig established a permanent studio there as early as 1909.

However, Los Angeles did not become the centre of the American industry until the First

World War.

Around 1903, the rise of film exchanges led to a crucial change in distribution practices,

which in turn created a radical change in modes of exhibition. The rise of permanent

venues, the nickelodeons that began to appear in numbers in 1906, made the film industry

a much more profitable business, encouraging others to join Edison, Biograph, and

Vitagraph as producers. Until this time the companies had sold rather than rented their

product to exhibitors. While this worked well for the travelling showmen who changed

their audiences from show to show, it acted against the establishment of permanent

exhibition sites. Dependent upon attracting repeat customers from the same

neighbourhood, permanent sites needed frequent changes of programme, and so long as

this involved having to purchase a large number of films it was prohibitively expensive.

The film exchanges solved this problem by buying the films from the manufacturers and

renting them to exhibitors, making permanent exhibition venues feasible and increasing

the medium's popularity. Improvements in projectors also facilitated the rise of permanent

venues, since exhibitors no longer had to rely on the production companies to supply

operators.

By 1908 the new medium was flourishing as never before, with the nickelodeons -- so

called because of their initial admission price of 5 cents -- springing up on every street

corner, and their urban patrons consumed by the 'nickel madness'. But the film industry

itself was in disarray. Neighbouring nickelodeons competed to rent the same films, or

actually rented the same films and competed for the same audience, while unscrupulous

exchanges were likely to supply exhibitors with films that had been in release so long that

rain-like scratches obscured the images. The exchanges and exhibitors now threatened to

wrest economic control of the industry from the producers. In addition civil authorities

and private reform groups, alarmed by the rapid growth of the new medium and its

perceived associations with workers and immigrants, began calling for film censorship

and regulation of the nickelodeons.

In late 1908, led by the Edison and Biograph companies, the producers attempted to

stabilize the industry and protect their own interests by forming the Motion Picture

Patents Company, or, as it was popularly known, the Trust. The Trust incorporated the

most important American producers and foreign firms distributing in the United States,

and was intended to exert oligopolistic control over the industry: Along with Edison and

Biograph, members included Vitagraph, the largest of American producers, Selig,

Essanay, Mélièlis, Pathé and Kleine, the Connecticutbased Kalem, and the Philadelphia-

based Lubin. The MPPC derived its powers from pooling patents on film stock, cameras,

and projectors, most of these owned by the Edison and Biograph companies. These two

had been engaged in lengthy legal disputes since Biograph was founded, but their

resolution now enabled them to claim the lion's share of the Trust's profits despite the fact

that they were at the time the two least prolific of the American production studios.

The members of the MPPC agreed to a standard price per foot for their films and

regularized the release of new films, each studio issuing from one to three reels a week on

a pre-established schedule. The MPPC did not attempt to exert its mastery through

outright ownership of distribution facilities and exhibition venues, but rather relied upon

exchanges' and exhibitors' needs for MPPC films and equipment that could only be

obtained by purchasing a licence. The licensed film exchanges had to lease films rather

than buy them outright, promising to return them after a certain period. Only licensed

exhibitors, supposedly vetted by the MPPC to ensure certain safety and sanitation

standards and required to pay weekly royalty on their patented projectors, could rent Trust

films from these exchanges. The Trust's arrangements had an immediate impact on the

market, freezing out much foreign competition so that by the end of 1909 imports

constituted less than half of released films, a percentage which continued to decline. The

prejudice against foreign films manifested in the Trust's exclusionary tactics may have

encouraged European studios to produce 'classic' subjects, literary adaptations and

historical epics for example, which were more acceptable to the American market. Pathé,

whose 1908 position as a primary supplier of product to American exchanges made it a

prominent member of the MPPC, pioneered this approach through the importation of

European high culture in the form of the film d'art.

In 1910 the MPPC began business practices that presaged those of the Hollywood studios,

establishing a separate distribution arm, the General Film Company. This instituted

standing orders (an early form of block booking) and zoning requirements that prevented

unnecessary competition by prescribing which exhibitors within a certain geographical

area could show a film. Higher rental rates for newly released films, versus lower ones for

those that had been in circulation, encouraged the differentiation of first-run venues from

those showing the older and less expensive product, another hallmark of the coming

studio system.

The Motion Picture Patents Company survived as a legal entity until 1915, when it was

declared illegal under the Asta Nielsen (1881-1972) provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust

Act, but even as early as 1912, several years before its de jure decline, the Trust had de

facto ceased to exert any significant control over the industry. Indeed, its members at this

point represented the old guard of the American film industry and many would cease to

exist soon after the court's unfavourable ruling. Their place was taken by the companies

of the nascent Hollywood moguls, many of whom had initially strengthened their position

in the industry through their resistance to the Trust's attempt to impose oligopolistic

control.

The MPPC's short-sighted plan to drive non-affiliated distributors and exhibitors out of

the business ironically sowed the seeds of its own destruction, for it gave rise to a

vigorous group of so-called 'independent' producers who supplied product to the many

unlicensed exchanges and nickelodeons. In late 1909, Carl Laemmle, who had entered the

business as a distributor, founded the Independent Moving Picture Company, known as

IMP, to produce films for his customers, since he could not purchase films from the

MPPC. By the end of the year IMP released two reels a week of its own as well as two

Italian reels from the Itala and Ambrosio companies, an output that rivalled the most

powerful of the Trust companies. Not only did Laemmle spearhead the opposition, but

IMP eventually expanded to become Universal, one of the major studios of the

Hollywood silent period. By this time several other independent producers had gone into

business, some of the more significant being the Centaur Film Manufacturing Company,

the Nestor Company, and New York Motion Picture Company, which first employed

Thomas Ince. In 1910 Edwin Thanhouser founded the Thanhouser Company, using the

stock company from his theatre and specializing in literary and theatrical adaptations.

Also in 1910, the same year the MPPC established the General Film Company, the

independents formed their own combination to resist the Trust. Their distribution arm, the

Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Company, mimicked the Trust's practices,

regulating release dates and the price per foot, and also instituting standing orders from

exchanges to the studios and from the exhibitors to the exchanges.

With this move, the independents ceased to be independent in anything but name, and by

1911 two rival oligopolies controlled the United States film industry. It is wrong to

assume, as have some historians, that the Trust met its demise because of its conservative

business practices and resistance to new ideas such as the feature film and the star system.

It was an MPPC company, Vitagraph, which made many of the first American multireel

films. Similarly, while Carl Laemmle of IMP has been credited with forcing other

producers to emulate the theatrical star system through his promotion of Florence

Lawrence in 1910, MPPC companies had previously publicized their use of theatrical

stars and showed no reluctance to tout their own home-grown products.

Before 1908, several factors had militated against the development of a cinematic star

system. Initially, most moving picture actors were transient, working on the stage as well,

and did not remain with any particular company long enough to warrant promotion as a

star. This situation changed in 1908 as studios began to establish regular stock companies.

Also, until around 1909, film action was usually staged too far away from the camera for

audiences to recognize actors' features, a precondition for fan loyalty. At the outset of the

nickelodeon period audience loyalty was to the studio trademark rather than the actors,

and so most companies, both Trust and independent, resisted a star system until about

1910, fearing it would shift the economic balance of power (as indeed it did to some

extent). For this reason, the Biograph Company, which had some of the most popular

actors under contract, would not reveal its players' names until 1913. Other members of

the MPPC, however, did experiment, as early as 1909, with publicizing their use of

theatrical stars; the Edison Company advertising Miss Cecil Spooner in its adaptation of

Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, and Vitagraph inserting a title into its Oliver Twist

stating that Miss Elita Proctor appeared as 'Nancy Sikes'. By the next year, the mechanics

of star publicity were set in motion, as Kalem made lobby cards of its stock company for

display in nickelodeons. Other companies followed suit, distributing photographs to fans

as well as exhibitors and sending their stars out on personal appearances. The biggest

American stars of this period were Florence Lawrence of IMP (formerly of Biograph),

Florence Turner and Maurice Costello of Vitagraph, and, of course, Mary Pickford of

Biograph. Other countries also gave prominence to leading actors and, more commonly,

actresses in this period. The Danish actress Asta Nielsen was a leading light of both the

German and Danish cinema, while in Italy divas such as Francesca Bertini and Lyda

Borelli starred in films which they also produced.

Like the American industry, the French industry came into its own in 1907-8. Film was no

longer considered a poor cousin of photography but rather a major entertainment which

threatened the popularity of more traditional forms, such as the theatre. The increased

importance of the medium was shown by the remarkable increase in the number of

Parisian cinemas, from only ten in 1906 to eighty-seven by the end of 1908, as well as the

appearance in that year of the first regular newspaper column devoted to the moving

pictures. Pathé remained the most important of the studios, its only serious domestic

competition coming from the Gaumont Company, founded by Léon Gaumont in 1895.

Although less significant than Pathé in terms of output and international presence, from

1905 to 1915 Gaumont had the largest studio in the world. The company also had the

distinction of employing the first woman director, Alice Guy Blache, who later founded

the Solax Company with her husband Herbert Blache. Gaumont's most important director

was Louis Feuillade, who specialized in the detective serial, the most popular of which

was Fantômas, produced between 1913 and 1914, and based on a series of popular novels

about a master criminal and his detective nemesis. The box-office success of Feuillade's

serials enabled Gaumont to overtake Pathé as the country's most powerful studio, but it

achieved this position on the eve of the World War which caused the end of French

domination of international markets.

The Italian film industry had a relatively late start, dominated as it was by Lumières in the

early years. The Cines Company, founded by the Italian aristocrats Marchese Ernesto

Pacelli and Barone Alberto Fassini, built the country's first studio in 1905 and became one

of the most important producers of the silent period. Cines set the pace for the industry as

a whole by producing the first Italian costume film, La presa di Roma ( The Capture of

Rome, 1905), starring the famous theatrical actor Carlo Rosaspina. During its initial years,

Cines concentrated mostly on comedies, contemporary melodramas, and actualities, in

1906 producing sixty fiction films and thirty actualities. 1907 saw the real take-off of the

Italian industry, with both production and exhibition flourishing. Cines had built its studio

in Rome, another important company, Ambrosio, operated from Turin, and several other

producers built studios in Milan. In this year there were 500 cinemas in the country with

total box-office receipts of 18 million lire.

By 1908, then, the Italian industry was able to compete on the international market with

France and the United States, the Italian studios strengthening their position through the

production of historical spectaculars. Ambrosio's first version of Gli ultimi giorni di

Pompei ( The Last Days of Pompeii) began a rage for the costume drama, many of which

dealt with Roman history or adapted Italian literary masterpieces: Giulio Cesare ( 1909),

Bruto ( 1909), and Il Conte Ugolino ( 1908, from Dante's Inferno). The relatively low

costs of building the massive sets and hiring the large casts of extras necessary for these

spectacle-intensive films enabled the Italians to differentiate their product from that of

their foreign rivals and break into the international market without massive expenditure.

This strategy succeeded so well that Pathé, concerned about Italian rivalry, established a

subsidiary, Film d'Arte Italiano, to produce costume films of its own. It took advantage of

location shooting amidst the splendours of Italian Renaissance architecture to produce

films like the 1909 Othello.

FILM PRODUCTION

In all the major producing countries, film production during this period was marked by an

increasing specialization and division of labour that brought the film industry into line

with other capitalist enterprises. In the early period film-making was a collaborative

enterprise, but the emergence of the director coincided with the appearance of other

specialists, such as script-writers, property men, and wardrobe mistresses, who worked

under his direction. Soon, the bigger American studios employed several directors, giving

each his own cast and crew and requiring him to turn out one reel a week. This led to the

creation of yet another job category, the producer, who oversaw the whole process, co-

ordinating between the individual units. In 1906 Vitagraph, the largest of the American

studios, had three separate production units headed by the company's founders, James

Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith, and their employee James Bernard French. These

men operated the cameras and had an assistant responsible for the staging of the action.

Vitagraph reorganized its production practices in 1907, putting a director in charge of

each unit and making Blackton the central producer. At Biograph, D. W. Griffith was the

sole director from June 1908 until December 1909. By the time Griffith left in autumn

1913, six directors were shooting Biograph films under his supervision, while he also

continued to direct his own unit.

With the exception of certain films designed to lend the new medium cultural

respectability, the American film industry during this period emphasized speed and

quantity. The studio front offices for the most part disdained 'artistry', since all films,

whether 'artistic' or not, sold for the same standard price per foot. In 1908 the average film

was shot in a single day at a cost of $200$500, and averaged one reel, or 1,000 feet, in

length. The introduction of artificial lighting in the form of mercury vapour lights in 1903

facilitated interior shooting but the studios still tended to film outdoors as much as

possible. Interiors were filmed in what were initially fairly small studios (the Biograph

studios were simply a converted New York City brownstone house) on theatrical sets with

painted backdrops.

Looking in more detail at the best documented of all the American studios, the Biograph

Company, permits us to follow the production of individual films through each step of the

process. In 1908 the Biograph Company hired one of their actors, David W. Griffith, as a

director, intending that he should simply rehearse the actors. But, as Griffith's cameraman

Billy Bitzer reported in his memoirs, the new director soon became responsible for much

more.

Before his [Griffith's] arrival, I, as cameraman, was responsible for everything except the

immediate hiring and handling of the actor. Soon it was his say whether the lights were

bright enough or if the make-up was right. . . . A cameraman had enough to do watching

the rapidity of the action and keeping the hand-cranked camera going at a steady pace to

prevent the film from buckling.

Until Griffith's institution as director, the Biograph Company had depended upon

transient actors, but the new director developed his own stock company, integral to the

period's ensemble style of film-making and, incidentally, presaging the Hollywood

studios' practice of keeping actors under exclusive contract. While Griffith had the

primary responsibility for hiring and casting, by the time he arrived at the studio Biograph

had a story department that had been producing scripts, perhaps since 1902. By the

nickelodeon period, it was standard practice for staff writers to prepare a script, often

without consulting the director, although in the case of Biograph Griffith seems to have

worked closely with the story department.

In most studios, although Biograph again may have been an exception, the principal

actors received scripts before the shooting occurred in order to prepare themselves for

rehearsals, which became increasingly important as stories grew more intricate. Rehearsal

time seems to have varied from one studio to another, although by 1911 a trade press

writer indicated that on average each scene was rehearsed from five to ten times. When

Griffith arrived at Biograph, the front office emphasized the rapid production of films,

and discouraged lengthy rehearsals, the directors simply ensuring that the actors remained

within camera range. By mid-1909, however, Griffith was already willing to devote half a

day or more to rehearsal, and by 1912 he averaged a week's rehearsal for each onereeler.

At Biograph, little remained to be done by the time of the actual shooting. The

cameraman's assistant put down the 'lines', using nails and cord to surround the area that

would be in the frame, and there would be a quick, final rehearsal for positioning. When

the camera began to crank, the actors were expected to do exactly what had been agreed

upon in rehearsals. Griffith did, however, coach from the sidelines, telling actors to tone it

down or give more. The tight schedule, with films taking only from one to three days to

shoot, prohibited retakes, requiring actors and technicians to get everything right first

time. In the days before sound and elaborate special effects, the post-production process

was fairly simple; the out-of-order shots were assembled according to the pre-existing

script, and intertitles added. Numerous positive prints were then run off by the laboratory

and the film was ready for sale to the exchanges.

THE BEGINNING OF NARRATIVE

There was a 'crisis' in transitional cinema around 1907, signalled by complaints in the

trade press about lack of narrative clarity, as well as by exhibitors' increased use of

lectures in an attempt to make films understandable to their audiences. Films were poised

between an emphasis upon visual pleasure, 'the cinema of attractions', and story-telling,

'the cinema of narrative integration', but conventions for constructing internally coherent

narratives had not yet been established. In the transitional years, between 1907-8 and

1917, the formal elements of film-making all became subsidiary to the narrative, as

lighting, composition, editing were all increasingly designed to help the audience follow a

story. Integral to these stories were psychologically credible characters, created through

performance style, editing, and dialogue intertitles, whose motivations and actions

seemed realistic and helped to link together a film's disparate shots and scenes. These

'well-rounded', believable characters, resembling those of the then fashionable realist

literature and drama, contrast sharply with the earlier period's one-dimensional stock

characters drawn from the melodrama and vaudeville comedy skits.

The increased use of editing and the decreased distance between camera and actors most

obviously distinguish the films of the transitional period from their predecessors. The

tableau or proscenium arch shot, showing the actors' entire bodies as well as the space

above and below them, characterized the early cinema. However, towards the beginning

of the transitional period the Vitagraph Company began using the so-called '9-foot line',

staging the action about 9 feet from the camera, a scale that showed the actors from the

ankles up. At around the same time in France, Pathé and companies under its influence,

Film d'Art and SCAGL, also adopted the 9-foot line. By 1911 the camera had moved yet

closer, producing the three-quarter shot that became the predominant scale of the

transitional cinema and indeed of the entire silent period. In addition to moving the

camera closer to the actors, film-makers also moved the actors closer to the camera. In

chase films the actors had exited the shots in close proximity to the camera, but during the

transitional period the practice became standardized, deliberately employed to enhance

dramatic effects, as in a shot from The Musketeers of Pig Alley ( Griffith, 1912) in which

a gangster slinks along a wall until he is seen in medium close-up.

The decreased distance between action and camera not only enabled identification of the

actors and the development of the star system, but also contributed to the increased

emphasis upon individualized characters and facial expression. Editing was also

developed for this end; both to emphasize moments of psychological intensity and to

externalize characters' thoughts and emotions. The three-quarter scale already permitted

audiences to see the actors' faces more clearly than before, but filmmakers often cut even

closer at climactic points. This was designed to encourage fuller viewer involvement in

the characters' emotions, and not, as in early films like The Great Train Robbery, simply

for shock value. For example, in The Lonedale Operator ( Griffith, Biograph, 1911)

burglars menace a telegraph operator ( Blanche Sweet) and attempt to break into her

office. As Sweet desperately telegraphs for help, the film cuts from a three-quarter to a

medium shot, allowing a closer view of her fearful expression.

Editing was also used more directly to convey characters' subjectivities. In the earlier

period, film-makers had adopted the theatrical 'vision scene', using double exposure to put

the character and a literal embodiment of externalized thoughts in the same frame. Life of

an American Fireman ( Edison, 1902), for example, uses this device to show a fireman

thinking of an imperilled family, who appear in a balloon slightly above him and to his

right. This convention continued in the transitional period, as in The Life Drama of

Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine of France (Vitagraph, 1909), in which

the divorced and distraught Empress reaches out to a superimposed vision of her erstwhile

husband. But the film's companion reel, Napoleon, the Man of Destiny, approaches the

conventional flashback structure of the Hollywood cinema, in which a 'present-day' shot

of the character authorizes the film's presentation of the 'past'. Napoleon returns to

Malmaison shortly before his exile to Elba and, as he 'thinks' of his past, the film cuts

from him to reenactments of battles and other events in his life.

The transitional period also saw the emergence of the editing pattern that is most closely

associated with character subjectivity: the point-of-view shot, in which a film cuts from a

character to what the character sees and then back to the character. This pattern did not

become fully conventionalized until the Hollywood period, but filmmakers during the

transitional period experimented with various means of 'showing' what characters saw. In

an early example, Francesca da Rimini (Vitagraph, 1907), there is a cut from a tableau-

scale shot of a character looking at a locket to an insert close-up of the locket. In The

Lonedale Operator, Enoch Arden ( 1911), and other films, Griffith cuts between

characters looking through a window to what they see, although the eyeline match seems

'imperfect' by today's standards.

This last kind of editing, of course, not only externalized characters' thoughts but helped

establish the spatial and temporal relations crucial to narrative coherence, both in the

same scene (roughly, actions occurring at the same place and time) and between scenes

taking place at the same time in different locations. In the earlier period film-makers

occasionally broke down the space of a shot, selecting details for closer examination, as

in Grandma's Reading Glasses. While not as prevalent as it was later to become, this

analytical editing was sometimes used in the transitional period to highlight narratively

important details rather than, as in the earlier period, simply to provide visual pleasure. In

The Lonedale Operator, for example, when the burglars eventually break into the

telegraph operator's office, she holds them at bay with what appears to be a revolver but a

cut-in reveals to be a wrench. While analytical editing was comparatively rare,

conventions for linking the different spaces of one scene together, to orientate the viewer

spatially, became established practice. In fact, part of the suspense in The Lonedale

Operator depends upon the viewer having a clear idea of the film's spatial relations. When

the telegraph operator first arrives at work, she walks from the railway office's porch into

an outer room and then into an inner room. Following the principle of directional

continuity, the actress exits each shot at screen right and re-enters at screen left. When the

burglars break through the outermost door, the viewer knows exactly how much further

they must go to reach the terrified woman. Here, character movement links the shots, but

various other conventions, many relating to the relative position of the camera in

successive set-ups, also arose for establishing spatial relations.

The Lonedale Operator also provides an example of an editing pattern primarily

associated with the name of its director, D. W. Griffith. He became famous for the

crosscutting, parallel action, or parallel editing through which he constructed his spine-

tingling last-minute rescues. Several pre-Griffith films, however, show that, while the

Biograph director may have conventionalized parallel editing, he did not invent it. Two

1907 Vitagraph films, The Mill Girl and The Hundred-to-One-Shot, cross-cut between

different locations, the latter even featuring a somewhat attenuated last-minute rescue.

Several Pathé films from 1907-8 also contain fairly brief parallel editing sequences, the

plot and editing of one, A Narrow Escape ( 1908), prefiguring Griffith's The Lonely Villa

( 1909). But from his earliest films, Griffith experimented with cutting between pursued,

pursuer, and potential rescuer, and he and other American directors soon developed

parallel editing beyond the fairly elementary form seen in French films. The climax of

The Lonedale Operator, for example, cuts from the menaced heroine, to the menacing

burglars breaking down doors, to the hero in the cab of a speeding locomotive, to an

exterior tracking shot of the onrushing train.

When Griffith first began directing at Biograph in 1908 his films averaged about

seventeen shots, increasing fivefold to an average of eighty-eight by 1913. The later

Griffith Biographs probably feature more shots per film than those produced by other

American studios, such as Vitagraph, during the same years, but American film-makers as

a general rule tended to rely more heavily on editing than did their European counterparts,

who were concerned more with the mise-en-scène and the possibilities of staging in

depth. American films tended to stage the action on a shallow plane, with actors entering

and exiting from the sides. Particularly toward the beginning of the transitional period,

they even used painted flats, making no attempt to disguise their theatricality. By contrast,

European films, particularly the French and Italian, began to create a sense of deep space

not possible in the theatre. Lowering the camera to waist level from its previous eye level

facilitated shooting in depth; the reduction of the empty space above the actors' heads

produced both a larger, closer view of the characters and much more contrast between

characters closer to and further from the camera, permitting the staging of action in the

foreground, midground, and background. Convincing threedimensional sets for interior

scenes, often with doors that gave glimpses of an even deeper space behind the set, added

to the illusion of depth. The use of doorways and contrasting light and shadows often

enhanced the feeling of deep space in exterior shots, as seen in Romeo and Juliet (Film

d'Arte Italiana, 1909). In one shot, Romeo returns to Verona and walks through the dark

shadow under an arch into the well-lit deep space behind. The next shot, Juliet's funeral

procession, is a graphic match cut to the shadowy arched doorway of a vast church out of

which pours a huge cast. The film holds the shot long enough for the many gorgeously

costumed extras to wind past the camera, the lengthy procession drawing the eye back to

the church door.

The American cinema's emphasis on editing rather than mise-en-scène was coupled with

the development of a new 'cinematic' performance style that contributed to the creation of

credible, individualized characters. Film acting began increasingly to resemble that of the

'realist' drama and to reject the codified conventions of an older performance style,

associated primarily with the melodrama. The earlier or 'histrionic' style was predicated

upon the assumption that acting bore no relation to 'real' or everyday life. Actors

expressed themselves through a pre-established lexicon of gestures and poses, all

corresponding to pre-specified emotions or states of mind. Movements were broad,

distinct, and forcefully performed. By contrast, the newer or 'verisimilar' style assumed

that actors should mimic everyday behaviour. Actors abandoned the standard and

conventionalized poses of the 'histrionic' style and externalized characters' thoughts and

emotions through facial expression, small individuated movements, and the use of props.

Two Griffith Biographs made three years apart, A Drunkard's Reformation ( 1909) and

Brutality ( 1912), illustrate the differences between the histrionic and verisimilar styles. In

both films a wife despairs over her husband's affection for the bottle. In the earlier film,

the wife ( Florence Lawrence) collapses into her chair and rests her head on her arms,

extended straight out in front of her on the table. Then she sinks to her knees and prays,

her arms fully extended upward at about 45 degrees. In the later film the wife (Mae

Marsh) sits down at the dining-room table, bows her head, and begins to collect the dirty

dishes. She looks up, compresses her lips, pauses, then begins to gather the dishes again.

Once more she pauses, raises her hand to her mouth, glances down to her side, and

slumps a little in her chair. Slumping a little more, she begins to cry.

The changing use of intertitles during the transitional period also related directly to the

construction of credible, individualized characters. Initially, intertitles had been

expository, often preceding a scene and providing fairly lengthy descriptions of the

upcoming action. Gradually, shorter expository titles dispersed throughout the scene

replaced these lengthy titles. More importantly, dialogue titles began to appear from 1910.

Film-makers experimented with the placement of these titles, first inserting them before

the shot in which the words were uttered, but by about 1913 cutting in the title just as the

character spoke. This had the effect of forging a stronger connection between words and

actor, serving further to individuate the characters.

If the formal elements of American film developed in this period, its subject-matter also

underwent some changes. The studios continued to produce actualities, travelogues, and

other non-fiction films, but the story film's popularity continued to increase until it

constituted the major portion of the studios' output. In 1907 comedies comprised 70 per

cent of fiction films, perhaps because the comic chase provided such an easy means for

linking shots together. But the development of other means of establishing spatio-

temporal continuity facilitated the proliferation of different genres.

Exhibitors made a conscious effort to attract a wide audience by programming a mix of

subjects; comedies, Westerns, melodramas, actualities, and so forth. The studios planned

their output to meet this demand for diversity. For example, in 1911 Vitagraph released a

military film, a drama, a Western, a comedy, and a special feature, often a costume film,

each week. Nickelodeon audiences apparently loved Westerns (as did European viewers),

to such an extent that trade press writers began to complain of the plethora of Westerns

and predict the genre's imminent decline. Civil War films also proved popular, particularly

during the war's fiftieth anniversary, which fell in this period. By 1911 comedies no

longer constituted the majority of fiction films, but still maintained a significant presence.

Responding to a prejudice against 'vulgar' slapstick, studios began to turn out the first

situation comedies, featuring a continuing cast of characters in domestic settings;

Biograph's Mr and Mrs Jones series, Vitagraph's John Bunny series, and Pathé's Max

Linder series. In 1912 Mack Sennett revived the slapstick comedy when he devoted his

Keystone Studios to the genre. Not numerous, but none the less significant, were the

'quality' films: literary adaptations, biblical epics, and historical costume dramas.

Contemporary dramas (and melodramas), featuring a wide variety of characters and

settings, formed an important component of studio output, not only in terms of sheer

numbers but in terms of their deployment of the formal elements discussed above.

Warner's first cinema, 'The Cascade', in New Castle, Pennsylvania, 1903

These contemporary dramas display a more consistent construction of internally coherent

narratives and credible individualized characters through editing, acting, and intertitles

than do any of the other genres. In these films, producers often emulated the narrative

forms and characters of respectable contemporary entertainments, such as the 'realist'

drama (the proverbial 'well-made' play) and 'realist' literature, rather than, as in the earlier

period, drawing upon vaudeville and magic lanterns. This emulation resulted partially

from the film industry's desire to attract a broader audience while placating the cinema's

critics, thus entering the mainstream of American middle-class culture as a respectable

mass medium. Integral to this strategy were the quality films, which brought 'high' culture

to nickelodeon audiences just at the moment when the proliferation of permanent

exhibition venues and the 'nickel madness' caused cultural arbiters to fear the potential

deleterious effects of the new medium.

Although the peak period of quality film production coincided roughly with the first years

of the nickelodeon ( 1908-9), film-makers had already produced 'high-culture' subjects

such as Parsifal ( Edison, 1904) and L'ÉpopÉe napolÉonienne ( PathÉ, 1903-4). In 1908

the French films d'art provided a model that would be followed by both European and

American film producers as they sought to attain cultural legitimacy. The SociÉtÉ Film

d'Art was founded by the financial firm Frères Lafitte for the specific purpose of luring

the middle classes to the cinema with prestige productions; adaptations of stage plays or

original material written for the screen by established authors (often members of the

Académie Française), starring wellknown theatrical actors (often members of the

ComédieFrançaise), The first and most famous of the films d'art, L'Assassinat du Duc de

Guise(The Assassination of the Duke of Guise), derived from a script written by Académie

member Henri Lavedan. Although based on a historical incident from the reign of Henry

II, the original script constructed an internally coherent narrative intended to be

understood without previous extra-textual knowledge. Reviewed in the New York Daily

Tribune upon its Paris première, the film made a major impact in the United States.

Further articles on the film d'art movement appeared in the mainstream press, while the

film trade press asserted that the films d'art should serve to inspire American producers to

new heights. The exceptional coverage accorded film d'art may have served as an

incentive for American film-makers to emulate this strategy at a time when the industry

badly needed to assert its cultural bona fides.

The Motion Picture Patents Company encouraged the production of quality films, and one

of its members, Vitagraph, was particularly active in the production of literary, historical,

and biblical topics. Included in its list of output between 1908 and 1913 were. A Comedy

of Errors, The Reprieve: An Episode in the Life of Abraham Lincoln ( 1908); Judgment of

Solomon, Oliver Twist, Richelieu; or, The Conspiracy, The Life of Moses (five reels)

( 1909); Twelfth Night, The Martyrdom of Thomas à Becket ( 1910); A Tale of Two Cities

(three reels), Vanity Fair ( 1911); Cardinal Wolsey ( 1912); and The Pickwick Papers

( 1913). Biograph, on the other hand, concentrated its efforts on bringing formal practices

in line with those of the middle-class stage and novel, and its relatively few quality films

tended to be literary adaptations, such as After Many Years ( 1908) (based on Ten nyson 's

Enoch Arden) and The Taming of the Shrew ( 1908). The Edison Company, while not as

prolific as Vitagraph, did turn out its share of quality films, including Nero and the

Burning of Rome ( 1909) and Les Misérables (two reels, 1910), while Thanhouser led the

independents in their bid for respectability with titles such as Jane Eyre ( 1910) and

Romeo and Juliet (two reels, 1911).

EXHIBITION AND AUDIENCES

During the early years of film production, the dominance of the non-fiction film, and its

exhibition in 'respectable' venues -- vaudeville and opera-houses, churches and lecture

halls -- kept the new medium from posing a threat to the cultural status quo. But the

advent of the story film and the associated rise of the nickelodeons changed this situation,

and resulted in a sustained assault against the film industry by state officials and private

reform groups. The industry's critics asserted that the dark, dirty, and unsafe nickelodeons

showed unsuitable fare, were often located in tenement districts, and were patronized by

the most unstable elements of American society who were all too vulnerable to the

physical and moral hazards posed by the picture shows. There were demands that state

authorities censor films and regulate exhibition sites. The industry responded with several

strategies designed to placate its critics: the emulation of respectable literature and drama;

the production of literary, historical, and biblical films; self-censorship and co-operation

with government officials in making exhibition sites safe and sanitary.

Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree playing the title role in the first US version of Macbeth ( John Emerson, 1916). This was one in a series of

quality dramas, often adaptations of Shakespeare, that BeerbohmTree starred in following the success of the 1910 British film Henry

VIII

Permanent exhibition sites were established in the United States as early as 1905, and by

1907 there were an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 nickelodeons; by 1909, 8,000, and by 1910,

10,000. By the start of 1909, cinema attendance was estimated at 45 million per week.

New York rivalled Chicago for the greatest concentration of nickelodeons, estimates

ranging from 500 to 800. New York City's converted store-front venues, with their

inadequate seating, insufficient ventilation, dim lighting, and poorly marked, often

obstructed exits, posed serious hazards for their patrons, as confirmed by numerous police

and fire department memos from the period. Regular newspaper reports of fires, panics,

and collapsing balconies undoubtedly contributed to popular perceptions of the

nickelodeons as deathtraps. Catastrophic accidents aside, the physical conditions were

linked to ill effects which threatened the community in more insidious ways. In 1908 a

civic reform group reported: 'Often the sanitary conditions of the show-rooms are bad;

bad air, floors uncleaned, no provision of spittoons, and the people crowded closely

together, all make contagion likely.'

There is no accurate information on the make-up of cinema audiences at this time, but

impressionistic reports seem to agree that, in urban areas at least, they were

predominantly working class, many were immigrants, and sometimes a majority were

women and children. While the film industry asserted that it provided an inexpensive

distraction to those who had neither the time nor the money for other entertainments,

reformers feared that 'immoral' films -- dealing with crimes, adultery, suicide, and other

unacceptable topics-would unduly influence these most susceptible of viewers and, worse

yet, that the promiscuous mingling of races, ethnicities, genders, and ages would give rise

to sexual transgressions.

State officials and private reform groups devised a variety of strategies for containing the

threat posed by the rapidly growing new medium. The regulation of film content seemed

a fairly simple solution and in many localities reformers called for official municipal

censorship. As early as 1907, Chicago established a board of police censors that reviewed

all films shown within its jurisdiction and often demanded the excision of 'offensive'

material. San Francisco's censors enforced a code so strict that it barred 'all films where

one person was seen to strike another'. Some states, Pennsylvania being the first in 1911,

instituted state censorship boards.

State and local authorities also devised various ways of regulating the exhibition sites.

Laws prohibiting certain activities on the Christian Sabbath were invoked to shut the

nickelodeons on Sundays, often the wage-earners' sole day off and hence the best day at

the box-office. Authorities also struck at box-office profits through state and local statutes

forbidding the admission of unaccompanied children, depriving exhibitors of a major

source of income. Zoning laws were used to prohibit the operation of nickelodeons within

close proximity to schools or churches. In counter-attacking, the industry attempted to

form alliances with influential state officials, educators, and clergymen by offering

evidence (or at least making assertions) that the new medium provided information and

clean, amusing entertainment for those otherwise bereft of either education or diversion.

The more powerful members of the industry, such as the Motion Picture Patents

Company, often encouraged the incorporation of health and safety requirements into local

ordinances dictating the construction of new exhibition venues and the upgrading of old

ones. The New York City ordinance of 1913, specifying in detail such matters as the

number of seats, aisle width, and air flow, represented the culmination of efforts to make

exhibition venues more salubrious, that is, bearing a stronger resemblance to legitimate

theatrical houses. In fact, in that year and in that city, the first 'movie palaces' appeared.

These large and well-appointed theatres contrasted strongly with the nickelodeons. With

seats for up to 2,000 patrons, architecture mimicking Egyptian temples or Chinese

pagodas, large orchestras, and uniformed ushers, these theatres provided environments

nearly as fantastic as those projected on to their screens.

Vitagraph's The Life of Moses ( 1909), one of the first 'feature' films.

It was not only in the United States that film houses faced criticism and opposition in this

period. Permanent exhibition sites appeared in Germany in 1910, a few years later than in

the United States, but the rapid growth and increasing popularity of the new medium

attracted the attention of state officials and private reform groups concerned about film's

possible malign influence upon susceptible audiences and the nation's culture. The Berlin

Police Commission instituted an official pre-censorship plan in 1906, a year earlier than

their Chicago counterparts. As in the United States, children were perceived as

particularly vulnerable and in need of protection. Teachers and clergymen produced

several studies testifying to cinema's deleterious effect upon the young while teachers'

associations and other groups for popular and continuing education denigrated the use of

the cinema for amusement and urged increased production of scientific films for teaching

purposes. In 1907 reformers joined together in the cinema reform movement

(Kinoreformbewegung) and touted the new medium's potential both for child and adult

education. Supported in their efforts by the trade press, who saw co-operation as a way to

avoid more official censorship, the cinema reformers were successful in persuading the

German industry to produce educational films, or Kulturfilme, that dealt with natural

sciences, geography, folklore, agriculture, industry, technology and crafts, medicine and

hygiene, sports, history, religion, and military affairs.

In 1912, literary intellectuals became interested in the by then predominant fiction film,

urging adherence to aesthetic standards to elevate the story film to art rather than'mere'

amusement. The industry responded with the Autorenfilm, or author film, the German

version of the film d'art. The first Autorenfilm, Der Andere (The Other One), was adapted

from a play by Paul Lindau about a case of split personality and starred the country's most

famous actor, Albert Bassermann. The prestigious theatre director Max Reinhardt

followed with filmed versions of two popular plays, Eine venezianische Nacht ( A

Venetian night', 1913) and Insel der Seligen (' Island of the blessed', 1913).

Britain had no real equivalent to the American nickelodeon period, although debates

about cinema's cultural and social status paralleled those taking place across the Atlantic.

By 1911, when film rental and permanent exhibition sites became standard, most cinemas

mimicked the up-market accoutrements of the legitimate theatre. Before this, films were

exhibited in a variety of locations-the music halls and fairgrounds that had constituted the

primary venues of the early period as well as the so-called 'penny gaffs'. Although never

as numerous and often more transient than the nickelodeons, these store-front shows were

equivalent to their American counterparts in being unsanitary and unsafe. The first theatre

devoted entirely to film exhibition seems to have been established in 1907, and, between

the following year and the advent of the World War, films were increasingly exhibited in

'picture palaces', the equivalent of the American 'movie palaces', replete with uniformed

ushers and red plush seating for up to 1,000 or even 2,000 customers. While prices

remained low enough to permit former patrons to continue to attend, all these amenities

served to distance the cinema from its previous associations with the music halls and the

working class, to attract, as the trade press fervently hoped, a 'better' class of customer.

Like their transatlantic counterparts, British filmmakers also pursued respectability

through more positive tactics. In 1910 producer Will Barker paid the eminent theatrical

actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree £1,000 for appearing in a film version of

Shakespeare's Henty VIII. Rather than selling the film outright to distributors, as was still

the dominant practice, Barker gave one distributor exclusive rights to rent, but not to sell,

the film, claiming that its high production costs and high cultural status required special

treatment. Barker produced other films of a similar nature, establishing the .exclusive' or

'quality' picture, the adjectives referring to both the films and their distribution. Hepworth

and other producers followed Barker's lead, adapting contemporary plays and literary

classics that would appeal to the customers now patronizing the up-market theatres. In

1911 the Urban Company issued a catalogue of films suitable for use in schools. In the

same year, the trade paper Bioscope urged the industry to persuade government

authorities to recognize the educational value of film, even arranging a film screening for

members of the London County Council.

French films d'art provided the model for film producers in other countries, in their quest

for cultural respectability. French film-makers also emulated the narrative strategies of

more respectable entertainments, imitating the stories in popular illustrated family

magazines such as Lectures pour tous. Upon taking the position as chief producer-director

at Gaumont in 1907, Louis Feuillade wrote an advertisement for the studio's new serial,

Scènes de la vie telle qu'elle est ( Scenes from Real Life), claiming that the films would

elevate the position of the French cinema by affiliating it with other respectable arts.

'They represent, for the first time, an attempt to project a realism on to the screen, just as

was done some years ago in literature, theatre, and art.'

EPILOGUE: TRANSITION TO FEATURE FILMS

By about 1913 the American film industry's strategies for attaining respectability --

emulating respectable entertainments, internal censorship, and improved exhibition

venues -- had begun to pay off. Conditions were very different from what they had been

in 1908 when the medium had been the centre of a cultural crisis. Now a mass audience

sat comfortably ensconced in elaborate movie palaces, watching the first true mass

medium. And the films they watched were beginning to change as well, telling longer

stories through a different deployment of formal elements than had been the case in 1908

or even 1912. A few years later, by 1917, the situation had changed yet again. The

majority of important and powerful studios were located in Hollywood, by now the centre

not only of American film-making but of world film-making, largely as a result of the

First World War disruption of the European industries. Hollywood production and

distribution practices now set the norm for the rest of the world. The films themselves had

grown from one reel to an average length of sixty to ninety minutes, as film-makers

mastered the demands of constructing lengthier narratives and codified into standard

practices the formal conventions experimented with during the transitional years.

The industry called these lengthier films 'features', adopting the vaudeville term referring

to a programme's main attraction. They were descended from the multiple reel films

produced by the members of the Motion Picture Patents Company and the independents

during the transitional period, as well as from foreign imports. Although film historians

have characterized the MPPC's business practices as somewhat retrograde, the honour of

producing the first American multi-reeler goes to Trust member Vitagraph. In 1909 and

1910 Vitagraph released the biblical blockbuster The Life of Moses; a five-reel film

depicting the story of the Hebrew leader from his adoption by the Pharaoh's daughter to

his death on Mount Sinai. Vitagraph continued to produce multi-reelers, and the other

studios adopted the policy. Biograph, for example, released the two-reel Civil War story

His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled, in 1911. Clearly, then, elements within the American

film industry had begun to chafe at the 1,000foot or fifteen-minute limit, finding it

increasingly impossible to tell a story within these constraints.

Existing distribution and exhibition practices, however, militated against conversion to

the multi-reel film. The limited seating of most nickelodeons dictated short programmes

featuring a variety of subjects in order to ensure rapid audience turnover and a profit. The

studios, therefore, treated each reel of the multi-reelers separately, releasing them to the

exchanges according to the agreed schedule, sometimes weeks apart, and the

nickelodeons, except in rare instances, showed only one reel in any specific programme,

charging the same admission price as they did for all their other films. For this reason, the

impetus for the transition to the feature film came from the European, and specifically

Italian, films imported into the country. Multi-reel foreign imports were distributed

outside the control of the Trust and the independents, with rental prices keyed to both

negative costs and boxoffice receipts. Instead of playing the nickelodeons, these features

were 'roadshowed' as a theatrical attraction, shown in legitimate theatres and opera-

houses.

Films from other countries, such as Queen Elizabeth ( Louis Mercanton, 1912), played a

part in establishing feature films as the norm, but it was the spectacular Italian costume

films whose profits and popularity persuaded the American industry to compete with

longer films of its own. In 1911 three Italian productions, the fivereel Dante's Inferno

(Milano Films, 1909), the two-reel Fall of Troy ( 1910,, Giovanni Pastrone), and the four-

reel The Crusaders or Jerusalem Delivered ( 1911), treated American audiences to a

pictorial splendour seldom seen in domestic productions -- elaborate sets and huge casts

enhanced through the use of deep space. Released in the United States in the spring of

1913, the nine-reel Quo vadis? ( Enrico Guazzoni , Cines, 1913), running for more than

two hours and exhibited exclusively in legitimate theatres, really sparked the craze for the

spectacular feature film. Adapted from the best-selling novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, the

film boasted 5,000 extras, a chariot race, and real lions, as well as clever lighting and

detailed set design. The 1914 Cabiria ( Giovanni Pastrone, Italia) capped the trend. The

twelve-reel depiction of the Second Punic War contained such visually stunning scenes as

the burning of the Roman fleet and Hannibal's crossing of the Alps. Pastrone enhanced the

film's spectacle through extended tracking shots (unusual at this time) that created a sense

of depth through movement rather than through set design.

Quo vadis? inspired a host of imitators, not least D. W. Griffith's own multi-reel biblical

spectacular, Judith of Bethulia ( 1913), which was made against the wishes of a Biograph

front office still committed to the one-reel film. But Griffith's own historical costume

drama epic, The Birth of a Nation ( 1915), excelled all previous features in length and

spectacle, while dealing with a truly American subject, the Civil War and Reconstruction.

It was this film that began to establish the feature as the norm rather than the exception.

Prior to the film's January 1915 release, Griffith's publicity department had hyped its

expense, huge cast, and historical accuracy, creating great public anticipation for the

famous director's most ambitious project. Griffith exercised as much care with the film's

exhibition. Premièred in the largest movie palaces in Los Angeles and New York, The

Birth of a Nation was the first American film to be released with its own score, played by

a forty-piece orchestra. The admission price of $2, the same as that charged for Broadway

plays, ensured that the film would be taken seriously, and it was widely advertised and

reviewed in the general press rather than the film trade press. All these factors showed

that film had come of age as a legitimate mass medium. Of course, the film attracted

attention for other reasons as well, its reprehensible racism eliciting outrage from the

AfricanAmerican community and their supporters, and offering an early insight into the

social impact that this new mass medium could have.

The narrative structures, character construction, and editing patterns of the first multi-reel

films, both American and Italian, strongly resembled those of the one-reel films of the

time. This was particularly apparent in terms of narrative structure: one-reelers tended to

follow a pattern of an elaborated single incident or plot device intensifying toward a

climax near the end of the reel. The first multi-reel American films, intended to stand on

their own, adopted this structure but, even after distribution channels became available,

longer films often continued to appear more like several one-reelers strung together than

the lengthy integrated narratives that we are accustomed to today. However, film-makers

quickly realized that the feature film was not simply a longer version of the one-reel film,

but a new narrative form, demanding new methods of organization, and they learned to

construct appropriate narratives, characters, and editing patterns. As they had in 1908,

producers again turned to the theatre and novels for inspiration, not only in terms of

screen adaptations but in terms of emulating narrative structures. Feature films, therefore,

began to include more characters, incidents, and themes, all relating to a main story.

Instead of one climax or a series of equally intense climaxes, features began to be

constructed around several minor climaxes and then a dénouement that resolved all the

narrative themes. The Birth of a Nation provides an extreme example of this structure, its

(in)famous lastminute rescue, as the Ku-Klux-Klan rides to secure Aryan supremacy,

capping several reels of crisis (the death of 'Little Sister', the capture of Gus, and so forth)

and resolving the fates of all the important characters.

However, the basic elements of the earlier films remained unchanged-credible individual

characters still served to link together the disparate scenes and shots, the difference being

that character motivation and plausibility became yet more important as films grew longer

and the number of important characters increased. Films now had the space to flesh out

their characters, endowing them with traits that would drive the narrative action. Often

entire scenes served the sole purpose of acquainting the audience with the characters'

personalities. The Birth of a Nation devotes its first fifteen minutes or so, before the

outbreak of the Civil War occurs, to introducing its major characters, seeking to engender

audience identification with the Southern slave-holding family, the Camerons. In scenes

that establish the plantation owners' kindly and tolerant natures, we see the pater familias

surrounded by puppies and kittens and his son Ben shaking hands with a slave who has

just danced for Northern visitors.

Feature films also deployed their formal elements to further character development and

motivation. Dialogue intertitles had first appeared around 1911, but their use increased so

that by the mid-1910s dialogue titles outnumbered the expository titles that revealed the

presence of a narrator; the responsibility for narration being accorded more and more to

the characters. Although the standard camera scale remained the three-quarter shot that

had become dominant during the transitional period, film-makers increasingly cut closer

to characters at moments of psychological intensity. In The Birth of a Nation, closer views

of terrified white women supposedly intensify audience identification with these potential

victims of a fate worse than death. Point-of-view editing also became standardized in the

feature films of this time. Although Griffith actually used this pattern fairly sparingly, in

two key scenes in The Birth we get Ben's point of view of his beloved Elsie, the first time

as he looks at a locket photograph of her and the second as he actually looks at her, an

irised shot of Elsie mimicking the photograph's composition.

The transition to features served to codify many of the devices that film-makers had

experimented with during the transitional period. This is particularly related to moves to

create a unified spatio-temporal orientation. Analytical editing became more common as

film-makers sought to highlight narratively important details. In the scene in The Birth

where Father Cameron plays with the puppies and kittens, a cut-in to a close-up of the

animals at his feet emphasizes the alignment of the Southern family with these appealing

creatures. Most features included some parallel editing, The Birth of course being the

locus classicus of the form, not only in the climactic lastminute rescue that cuts among

several different locations, but throughout the film where alternation between Northern

and Southern families and the home front and the battlefield reinforces the film's

ideological message. Devices such as the eyeline match and the shot/reverseshot became

standard conventions for linking disparate spaces together, and devices such as the

dissolve, fade, and close-up became clear markers of any deviations from linear

temporality such as flashbacks or dreams.

After a decade of profound upheaval, by 1917, the end of the 'transitional' period, the

cinema was poised on the brink of a new maturity as the dominant medium of the

twentieth century. Films, while continuing to reference other texts, had freed themselves

from dependence upon other media, and could now tell cinematic stories using cinematic

devices; devices which were becoming increasingly codified and conventional. A

standardization of production practices, consonant with the operations of other capitalist

enterprises, assured the continuing output of a reliable and familiar product, the so-called

'feature' film. The building of ever larger and more elaborate movie palaces heralded the

medium's new-found social respectability. All was ready for the advent of Hollywood and

the Hollywood cinema.

Bibliography

Abel, Richard ( 1988), French Film Theory and Criticism.

Balio, Tino (ed.) ( 1985), The American Film Industry.

Bitzer, Billy ( 1973), Billy Bitzer: His Story.

Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), The Classical Hollywood

Cinema.

Bowser, Eileen ( 1990), The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915.

Cosandey, Roland, Gaudreault, Andre, and Gunning, Tom (eds.) ( 1992), Une invention

du diable?

Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.) ( 1990), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative.

Fell, John L. ( 1986), Film and the Narrative Tradition.

Gunning, Tom ( 1991), D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film.

Jartart, Vernon ( 1951), The Italian Cinema.

Koszarski, Richard ( 1990), An Evening's Entertainment.

Low, Rachael ( 1949), The History of the British Film, 1906-1914.

Pearson, Roberta E. ( 1992), Eloquent Gestures.

Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), Exporting Entertainment.

Uricchio, William, and Pearson, Roberta E. ( 1993), Reframing Culture: The Case of the

Vitagraph Quality Films.

Asta Nielsen (1881-1972)

After Joyless Street ( 1925), Asta Nielsen was called the greatest tragedienne since Sarah

Bernhardt. However, her fame was established fifteen years earlier with her first screen

appearance in The Abyss ( Afgrunden, 1910), a film of sexual bondage and passion

featuring the erotic 'gaucho' dance in which Nielsen, a respectable girl led astray, ties up

her lover with a whip on stage as she twists her body around his provocatively. The Abyss

was an explosive success and Nielsen became, overnight, the first international star of the

cinema, celebrated from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro. Her performance brought people to

the cinema who had never before taken it seriously as an art form. Her personal

appearances drew crowds around the world.Born in Denmark to a working-class family,

Nielsen began acting in the theatre. There she met Urban Gad, who produced and directed

The Abyss and became her husband. The couple moved to Berlin, where Nielsen became

one of the greatest stars of the German cinema, making nearly seventy-five films in two

decades. Between 1910 and 1915, Nielsen and Gad collaborated on over thirty films,

establishing the signature style of the first period. In these early films, Nielsen's sensuality

is matched by her intelligence, resourcefulness, and a boyish physical agility. Her

expressive face and body seem immediate and modern, especially when compared with

the exaggerated gestures that were common in early cinema. Her powerful, slim figure

and large, dark eyes, set off by dramatic, suggestive costumes, allowed her to cross class

and even gender lines convicingly. She became, in turn, a society lady, a circus performer,

a scrubwoman, an artist's model, a suffragette, a gypsy, a newspaper reporter, a child

( Engelein, 1913), a male bandit ( Zapatas Bande, 1914) and Hamlet ( 1920). She excelled

at embodying individualized, unconventional women whose stories conveyed their

entanglement within, and their resistance to, an invisible web of confining class and sex

roles. She surpassed all others in her uniquely cinematic, understated manner of

expressing inner conflict. Nielsen's celebrated naturalness was the result of careful study

in her autobiography, she described how she learnt to improve her acting by watching

herself magnified on the screen. Nielsen was a key influence on the shift away from

naturalism that characterized German cinema after the First World War. Her techniques

for conveying psychological conflict became stylized gestures emphasizing a sense of

claustrophobia and limitations. Nielsen's spontaneity slowed, her contagious smile rarely

in evidence except as a bitter-sweet reminder of her past. Close-ups now emphasized the

mask-like quality of her face. Her enactments of older women doomed and self-

condemning in their passionate attachment to shallow, younger men ( Joyless Street;

Dirnentragödie, 1927) only take on their proper resonance when contrasted to Nielsen's

earlier embodiment of young women struggling against social constaints.

Asta Nielsen

JANET BERGSTROM SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY (All films directed by Urban

Gad unless otherwise indicated) Afgrunden (The Abyss) ( 1910); Der fremde Vogel

( 1911); Die arme Jenny ( 1912); Das Mädchen ohne Vaterland ( 1912); Die Süden der

Väter ( 1913); Die Suffragette ( 1913); Der Filmprimadonna ( 1913; Engelein ( 1914);

Zapatas Bande ( 1914); Vordertreppe und Hintertreppe ( 1915); Weisse Rosen ( 1917);

Rausch (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1919; no surviving print); Hamlet (dir. Svend Gade, 1921);

Vanina (dir Arthur von Gerlach, 1922); Erdgeist (dir. Leopold Jessner, 1923); Die

freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street) (dir. G. W. Pabst, 1925); Dirnentragödie (dir. Bruno

Rahn, 1927)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Robert C. ( 1973), "The Silent Muse".

Bergstrom, Janet ( 1990), "Asta Nielsen's Early German Films".

Seydel, Renate, and Hagedorff, Allan (eds.) ( 1981), Asta Nielsen.

David Wark Griffith (1875-1948)

Born in Kentucky on 23 January 1875, the son of Civil War veteran Colonel 'Roaring

Jake' Griffith, David Wark Griffith left his native state at the age of 20 and spent the next

thirteen years in rather unsuccessful pursuit of a theatrical career, for the most part touring

with secondrate stock companies. In 1907; after the failure of the Washington, DC,

production of his play A Fool and a Girl, Griffith entered the by then flourishing film

industry, writing brief scenarios and acting for both the Edison and Biograph companies.

In the spring of 1908 the Biograph front office, facing a shortage of directors, offered

Griffith the position and launched him, at the age of 33, on the career which most suited

him.

Between 1908 and 1913 Griffith personally directed over 400 Biograph films, the first,

The Adventures of Dollie, released in 1908 and the last, the four-reel biblical epic Judith

of Bethulia, released in 1914, severl months after Griffith and Biograph had parted

company. The contrast between the earliest and latest Biograph films is truly astonishing,

particularly with regard to the aspects of cinema upon which Griffith seems to have

concentrated most attention, editing and performance. In terms of editing, Griffith is

perhaps most closely associated with the elaborate deployment of cross-cutting in his

famous last-minute rescue scenes, but his films also exerted a major influence upon the

codification of other editing devices such as cutting closer to the actors at moments of

psychological intensity. With regard to acting, the Biograph films were recognized even at

the time as most closely approaching a new, more intimate, more 'cinematic' performance

style. Several decades after they were made, the Biograph film continue to fascinate not

only because of their increasing formal sophistication, but also because of their

explorations of the most pressing social issues of their time: changing gender roles;

increasing urbanization; racism; and so forth.

Increasing chafing under the conservative policies of Biograph's front office, particularly

the resistance to the feature film, Griffith left Biograph in late 1913 to form his own

production company. First experimenting with several multi-reelers, in July 1914 Griffith

began shooting the film that would have assured him his place in film history had he

directed nothing else. Released in January 1915, the twelve-reel The Birth of a Nation, the

longest American feature film to date, hastened the American film industry's transition to

the feature film, as well as showing cinema's potential for great social impact. The Birth

also had a profound impact upon its director, for in many ways Griffith spent the rest of

his career trying to surpass, defend, or atone for this film.

His next feature, Intolerance, released in 1916, was a direct response to the criticism and

censorship of The Birth of a Nation, as well as an attempt to exceed the film's spectacular

dimensions. Intolerance rather unsuccessfully weaves together four different stories all

purporting to deal with intolerance across the ages. The two most prominent sections are

'The Mother and the Law', in which Mae Marsh plays a young woman attempting to deal

with the vicissitudes of modern urban existence, and 'The Fall of Babylon', dealing with

the Persian invasion of Mesopotamia in the sixth century and featuring massive, elaborate

sets and battle scenes with hundreds of extras. In an editing tour de force, the film's

famous ending weaves together last-minute rescue sequences in all four stories. The third

of the important Griffith features, Broken Blossoms, is by contrast a relatively smallscale

effort focused on three protagonists, an abused teenager, played by Lillian Gish in one of

her most impressive performances, her brutal stepfather, Donald Grisp, and the gentle and

symathetic Chinese who befriends her, this role, as enacted by Richard Barthelmess,

clearly intended to prove that Mr Griffith was no racist after all.

After the release of Broken Blossoms in 1919, Griffith's career began a downward

trajectory, both artistically and financially, which he never managed to reverse.

D. W. Griffith on set, with cameraman Billy Bitzer and E. Dorothy Gish

Plagued to the end of his life by the financial difficulties attendant upon an unsuccessful

attempt to establish himself as an independent producer-director outside Hollywood,

perhaps more importantly Griffith never seemed able to adjust to the changing

sensibilities of post-war America, his Victorian sentimentalities rendering him out of sync

with the increasingly sophisticated audiences of the Jazz Age. Indeed, the two most

important Griffith features of the 1920s, Way Down East ( 1920) and Orphans of the

Storm ( 1921), were cinematic adaptations of hoary old theatrical melodramas. While

these films have their moments, particularly in the performances of their star Lillian Gish,

they none the less look determinedly back to cinema's origins in the nineteenth century

rather than demonstrate its potential as the major medium of the twentieth century.

Making a serise of increasingly less impressive features throughout the rest of the decade,

Griffith did survive in the industry long enough to direct two sound films, Abraham

Lincoln ( 1930) and The Struggle ( 1931). The latter, a critical and financial failure,

doomed Griffith to a marginal existence in a Hollywood where you are only as good as

your last picture. He died in 1948, serving occasionally as script-doctor or consultant, but

never directing another film.

ROBERTA PEARSON SELECT FILMOGRAPHY Shorts The Song of the Shirt

( 1908); A Corner in Wheat ( 1909); A Drunkard's Reformation ( 1909); The Lonely Villa

( 1909); In Old Kentucky ( 1910); The Lonedale Operator ( 1911); Musketeers of Pig

Alley ( 1912); The Painted Lady ( 1912); The New York Hat ( 1912); The Mothering

Heart ( 1913); The Battle of Elderbush Gulch ( 1914)Features Judith of Bethulia ( 1914);

The Birth of a Nation ( 1915); Intolerance ( 1916); Broken Blossoms ( 1919); Way Down

East ( 1920); Orphans of the Storm ( 1921); Abraham Lincoln ( 1930)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gunning Tom ( 1991), D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film.

Pearson, Roberta E. ( 1992), Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance

Style in the Griffith Biograph Films.

Schickel, Richard ( 1984), D. W. Griffith: An American Life.

Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959)

Cecil B. DeMille was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts, the son of a playwright and a

former actress. He tried his hand at both his parents' professions, without much success,

until two tyro producers, Jesse L. Lasky and Sam Goldfish (later Goldwyn), invited him

to direct a film. This was The Squaw Man ( 1914), the first American feature-length

movie and one of the first films to be made in the small rural township of Hollywood. A

thunderously old-fashioned melodrama, it was a huge hit. By the end of 1914 DeMille,

with five more pictures under his belt and hailed as one of the foremost young directors,

was supervising four separate units shooting one the Lasky lot, later to become

Paramount Studios.

DeMille's prodigious energy was matched, at this state, of his career, by an enthusiasm for

innovation. Though relying for his plots mainly on well-worn stage dramas by the likes of

Belasco or Booth Tarkington, he actively experimented with lighting, cutting, and framing

to extend narrative technique. The Cheat ( 1915), much admired in France (notably by

Marcel L'Herbier and Abel Gance), featured probably the first use of psychological

editing: cutting not between two simultaneous events but to show the drift of a character's

thoughts. 'So sensitive was DeMille's handling', observes Kevin Brownlow, 'that a

potentially foolish melodrama became a serious, bizarre and disturbing fable.'

The Whispering Chorus ( 1918) was even more avantgarde, its sombre, obsessive story

and shadowy lighting anticipating elements of film noir. But it was poorly received, as

was DeMille's first attempt at a grand historical spectacular, the Joan of Arc epic Joan the

Woman ( 1917). Aiming to recapture box-office popularity, DeMille changed course - for

the worse, some would say. 'As he lowered his sights to meet the lowest common

denominator,' Brownlow maintains, 'so the standard of his films plummeted.' With Old

Wives for New ( 1918) he embarked on a series of 'modern' sex comedies in which

alluring scenes of glamour and fast living - including, wherever possible, a coyly

titillating bath episode - were offset by a last-reel reaffirmation of traditional morality.

Box-office receipts soared, but DeMille's critical reputation took a dive from which it

never recovered.

This increasingly didactic post - preaching virtue, while giving audiences a good long

look at the wickedness of vice - found its logical outcome in DeMille's first biblical epic,

the $1m The Ten Commandments ( 1923). Despite misgivings at Paramount, now run by

the unsympathetic Adolph Zukor, the film was a huge success. Two years later DeMille

quit Paramount and set up his own company, Cinema Corporation of America, to make an

equally ambitious life of Christ, King of Kings ( 1927). This was an even bigger hit, but

CCA's other films flopped and the company folded. After a brief, unhappy stay at MGM

DeMille swallowed his dislike of Zukor and rejoined Paramount, at a fraction of his

former salary.

Cecil B. DeMille on set, c. 1928

To consolidate his position, DeMille shrewdly merged his two most successful formulas

to date, the religious epic and the sex comedy, in The Sign of the Cross ( 1932): opulent

debauchery on a lavish scale (with Claudette Colbert's Poppaea in the lushes bath

sceneyet) and a devout message to tie it all up. Critics sneered, but the public flocked.

When they stayed away from his next two films, both smaller-scale, modern dramas,

DeMille drew the moral: grandiose and historical was what paid off. From

Then on, in Charles Higham's view ( 1973), he abandoned the artistic aspirations which

had driven him as a young man. He would simply set out to be a supremely successful

film-maker.'

Cleopatra ( 1934) dispensed with religion, but made up for it with plenty of sex and some

powerfully staged battle scenes. With The Plainsman ( 1937) DeMille inaugurated a cycle

of early Americana, Leavening his evangelical message with the theme of Manifest

Destiny. The brassbound morality and galumphing narrative drive of films like Union

Pacific ( 1942) or Unconquered ( 1947) were calculated, Sumiko Higashi suggests, 'to

reaffirm audience belief in the nation's future, especially its destiny as a great commercial

power'.

The one-time innovator had now become defiantly oldfashioned. His last biblical epics,

Samson and Delilah ( 1949) and the remake of The Ten Commandments ( 1956) are lit

and staged as a series of pictorial tableaux with the director himself, where needed,

providing the voice of God. DeMille had always been known as an autocratic director; in

his later films the hierarchical principle informs the whole film-making process, casting

the audience in a subservient, childlike role. Yet audiences did not stay away. For all his

limitations, DeMille retained to the end the simple, compulsive appeal of the born

storyteller.

PHILIP KEMP

SELECT FILMOGRAPHY

The Squaw Man ( 1914); The Virginian ( 1914); Joan the Woman ( 1917); The

Whisperting Chorus ( 1918); Old Wives for New ( 1918); The Affairs of Anatol ( 1921);

The Ten Commandments ( 1923); King of Kings ( 1927); The Sign of the Cross ( 1932);

Cleopatra ( 1934); The Plainsman ( 1937); Union Pacific ( 1939); Unconquered ( 1947);

Samson and Delilah ( 1949); The Greatest Show on Earth ( 1952); The Ten

Commandments ( 1956).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brownlow, Kevin ( 1968), The Parade's Gome By. DeMille, Cecil B. ( 1959), The

Autobiography of Cecil B DeMille. Higashi, Sumiko ( 1985), Cecil B DeMille: A Guide

to References and Resources. Higham, Charles ( 1973), Cecil B DeMille.

Lillian Gish (1893-1993)

Dorothy Gish (1898-1968)

Lillian and Dorothy Gish were born in Ohio, daughters of an actress and her absentee

drifter husband. Stage juveniles being in constant demand, both girls were acting

professionally before they were 5. They were enticed into movies by their friend Mary

Pickford, who was already working for D. W. Griffith, and they made their screen début

together in his An Unseen Enemy ( 1912).

Over the next two years the sisters played numerous roles for Griffith's company, both

together and separately. At first Griffith had trouble telling them apart (tying coloured

ribbons in their hair, he addressed them as 'red' and 'blue') but their very different

characters, and screen personae, soon emerged. Dorothy was effervescent, gregarious, a

natural comedienne. Lillian was serious, intense, with a toughness belied by her delicate

looks. 'When Dorothy arrives the party begins,' Lillian once remarked, adding wryly,

'When I arrive it usually ends.'

Dorothy, Griffith noted, 'was more apt at getting the director's idea than Lillian, quicker to

follow it, more easily satisfied with the result. Lillian conceived an ideal and patiently

sought to realize it.' Since this dedicated approach appealed more to Griffith's own

workaholic temperament, Lillian generally got the better parts, and was awarded the lead

in his epoch-making Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation ( 1915). As Elsie Stoneman,

daughter of a family split by the conflict, she transcended the heartsand-flowers, virgin-

in-jeopardy elements of the role with a performance of sustained emotional truth. The

film made her a major star, as Griffith acknowledged in casting her as the iconic cradle-

rocking Mother linking the four stories of his next epic, Intolerance ( 1916).

There seems to have been no rivalry between the sisters. Lillian suggested Dorothy as a

rowdy Frenh peasant girl in their first major film together, the First World War drama

Hearts of the World ( 1918), and was amused when Dorothy stole the picture. Even so,

Dorothy continued to work for other directors, while Griffith reserved Lillian ('She is the

best actress I know. She has the most brains') for his own films.

Lillian's supreme performance for Griffith was as the abused child of Broken Blossoms

( 1919), terrorized by a brutal father and finding tenderness with a lonely young

Chinaman in nineteenth-century Limehouse. It was pure Victorian melodrama, dripping

with sentiment, but transmuted by the subtlety of Gish's acting and the power -- for all her

ethereal looks -- with which she could convey raw emotion. Way Down East ( 1920), no

less melodramatic, made equally good use of her blend of physical frailty and inner

tenacity.

Dorothy continued to specialize in comedies, including one directed by Lillian,

Remodelling her Husband ( 1920). It did well, but Lillian found directing 'too

complicated' and refused to try it again. Dorothy's range reached far beyond comedy, as

shown by their finest film together, Orphans of the Storm ( 1921). The played sisters

caught up in the French Revolution; Dorothy's performance as the blind sister, moving but

not for a moment mawkish, is in no way overshadowed by Lillian's.

Opposite: Lillian and Dorothy Gish in D. W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm ( 1921)

It was their last film for Griffith, who could no longer afford Lillian's salary. They

parted from him amicably and moved to the Inspiration Company, where they made

Romola ( 1924) together -- from George Eliot's novel -- before Lillian signed a contract

with MGM. Dorothy went to London for four films for Herbert Wilcox , of which the

most successful was Nell Gwynne ( 1926).Lillian was now one of the highest paid

($400,000 p.a.) actresses in Hollywood, able to approve her own scripts and diretors. She

chose Victor Sjöström to direct her in two of her greatest roles: a passionate, wayward

Hester Prynne in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter ( 1926), and the gentle wife whipped

into desperation by the elements in The Wind ( 1928), a performance of awesome

physicality.But fashions were changing. Garbo's star was in the ascendant, and Lillian was

too identified with virginal virtues and the silent cinema. Irving Thalberg offered to

fabricate a scandal for her; she coolly declined, and returned to the live stage. Dorothy did

the same, her film career virtually over. Lillian, though, appeared in a dozen or so films

after 1940, of which the finest was Laughton's Gothic fable The Night of the Hunter

( 1955). In it she portrays, as Simon Callow ( 1987) comments, 'the spirit of absolution

and healing. . . with a kind of secular sanctity which cannot be forged'. Gish relished

making the film: 'I have to go back as far as D. W. Griffith to find a set so imbued with

purpose and harmony.' Coming from her, there could be no greater praise.Lillian outlived

her sister by a quarter-century, ageing gracefully and still acting in her mid-nineties. Well

before her death, she saw herself securely reinstated as the supreme actress of the silent

cinema. Dorothy, a fine actress if not a great one, still awaits fair reassessment.

PHILIP KEMP SELECT FILMOGRAPHY Lillian The Birth of a Nation ( 1915);

Intolerance ( 1916); Broken Blossoms ( 1919); True Heart Susie ( 1919); Way Down East

( 1920); La Bohème ( 1926); The Scarlet Letter ( 1926); The Wind ( 1928); Duel in the

Sun ( 1946); The Night of the Hunter ( 1955); The Cobweb ( 1955); The Unforgiven

( 1955); A Wedding ( 1978); The Whales of August ( 1987) Dorothy Remódelling her

Husband ( 1920); Nell Gwynne ( 1926) Lillian and Dorothy Hearts of the World ( 1918);

Orphans of the Storm ( 1921); Romola ( 1924)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gish, Lillian ( 1969), The Movies, Mr Griffith and Me.

-- ( 1973), Dorothy and Lillian Gish.

Slide, Anthony ( 1973), The Griffith Actresses.

THE RISE OF HOLLYWOOD

The Hollywood Studio System

DOUGLAS GOMERY

Around the year 1910 a number of film companies set up business in and around the

small suburb of Hollywood to the west of Los Angeles. Within a decade, the system they

created came to dominate the cinema, not only in the United States but throughout the

world. By concentrating production into vast factory-like studios, and by vertically

integrating all aspects of the business, from production to publicity to distribution to

exhibition, they created a model system-the 'studio system'-which other countries had to

imitate in order to compete. But attempts at imitating the American system were only

partially successful, and by 1925 it was the ' Hollywood' system, rather than the studio

system as such, which dominated the market from Britain to Bengal, from South Africa to

Norway and Sweden. By that time, Hollywood had not only seized control of the majority

of world markets but had made its products and its stars, such as Charlie Chaplin and

Mary Pickford, the most famous cultural icons in the world.

Throughout the period of its inexorable rise, Hollywood fashioned the tools of modern

business, from economics of scale to vertical integration, to give it the edge over all

possible competitors. It developed cost-effective methods of production, extended the

market for its product to cover the entire globe, and ensured the flow of films from

producer to consumer by acquiring ownership of key theatres in major cities, not just in

the United States but in other countries as well. European nations tried various

protectionist measures, such as special taxes, tariffs, quotas, and even boycotts, to keep

Hollywood's domination at bay, but to no avail. Although the Japanese market remained

hard to penetrate, and the Soviet Union was able to close its frontiers against foreign

imports in the mid-1920s, as far as the rest of the world was concerned it was only a

matter of time before the Hollywood film became standard fare on the nation's screens.

The emergence of Hollywood as the centre of this allpowerful industry can be found in

the failures of the Motion Picture Patents Company's attempt to monopolize the film

business. This was a combination of ten leading American and European producers of

movies and manufacturers of cameras and projectors, who in 1908 combined to form a

'Trust' to inflate the prices of equipment they alone could manufacture. The Trust pooled

patents and made thousands of short films. Only co-operating companies, licensed by the

Trust, could manufacture 'legal' films and film equipment. The Trust extracted profits by

charging for use of its patents. To use a projector legally an exhibitor needed to hand over

a few dollars; to make movies, producers paid more.

However, the Trust found it difficult to maintain control, and in the space of half a dozen

years ( 1909-14) independents such as Carl Laemmle and William Fox rose in opposition

to the Trust, sowing the seeds of what we now know as Hollywood. Adolph Zukor put

together Paramount; Marcus Loew created what was to become MGM; William Fox

fashioned his movie empire.

These and other independent exhibitors and moviemakers differentiated their products,

making longer and more complicated narratives while the Trust tended to stick with two-

reel, fifteen-minute stories. The independents raided pulp magazines, public domain

novels, and successful plays for plots. Westerns supplied the most popular of these 'new'

movie genres and helped spark interest in shooting on location 'out West'. In time the

independents found their home in southern California, 2,000 miles away from the New

York headquarters of the Trust and, with its temperate climate, cheap land, and lack of

unions, an ideal place to make their new low-cost 'feature-length' motion pictures.

By 1912 the independents were producing enough films to fill theatrical bills. Each movie

became a unique product, heavily advertised. With more than 20,000 cinemas open in the

USA by 1920, the ever-increasing number of feature-length 'photoplays' easily found an

audience. Distribution into foreign markets proved a bonus; in this era of the silent

cinema, specialists quickly translated intertitles, and produced foreign versions for

minimal added production costs.

The independents also began to take control of exhibition in the USA. They did not

attempt to buy up all the 20,000 existing movie houses, concentrating instead on the new

movie palaces in the largest cities. By 1920 these 2,000 picture palaces, showing

exclusive first-runs, were capturing over three-quarters of the revenue of the average film.

From these chains of movie palaces from New York City to Chicago to Los Angeles, the

major Hollywood companies, led by Paramount, Fox, and MGM, were able to collect

millions of dollars per year in profit.

By this time the independents were independents no longer. They had become the system.

The most successful of these former independents succeeded at what the wellfinanced

members of the Trust had failed to accomplish -control of the production, distribution,

and exhibition of movies. From this massive base they moved to dominate the world.

With any one film costing $100,000 or more to produce, the extra few thousand dollars to

make prints and send them around the world proved relatively small.

This world-wide popularity in turn created a demand which required non-stop production.

To meet this requirement, the Los Angeles basin offered year-round sunshine and thus

long working days outdoors, in addition to all possible combinations of locations for

filming. Nearby farmland (now swallowed up by suburbs) fronted for the Midwest; the

Pacific Ocean stood in for the Caribbean and Atlantic; mountains and desert, just a day

away, gave Westerns an authentic feel.

By the early 1920s the social impact of Hollywood's glamorous image was enormous. As

early as 1920, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce was obliged to run advertisements

begging aspiring actors and actresses to stay at home, pleading: 'Please Don't Try to Break

into the Movies.'

THE PRODUCTION SYSTEM

During the late 1910s and early 1920s, the successful companies, led by Adolph Zukor's

Famous Players-Lasky corporation, developed a system by which to manufacture popular

films on a large scale. This system was much admired abroad, and film industries the

world over sent their representatives over to Hollywood to study and, if possible, copy it.

As well as visitors from France, Germany, and Britain, Hollywood was to play host in the

1930s to Luigi Freddi, head of the Italian Fascist film industry, and to Boris Shumyatsky,

Stalin's henchman in charge of the industry in the Soviet Union.

The centrepiece of the product offered by the Hollywood companies was the feature film,

generally about ninety minutes long. Ten-minute newsreels or animated subjects might

provide a complement, but it was the feature that sold the show. The feature film had to

be a story of unusual interest, produced at a cost of about $100,000, sometimes up to

$500,000. Ironically, inspiration for this had come from Europe. Through the 1910s

foreign features repeatedly demonstrated that longer films could draw sizeable audiences.

The then independents imported epics from European film-makers who did not care to

book through the Trust. The success of prestigious Italian productions such as Dante's

Inferno ( 1911) not only proved there existed a market for longer fare, but helped to give

the new medium much-needed respectability in the eyes of the traditional middle class.

In 1911 Dante's Inferno enjoyed successful extended engagements in New York and

Boston. Where the average two-reel Trust film may have played two days, Dante's Inferno

was held over for two weeks. Where the average Trust film was shown in a 200-seat

'odeon' for 10 cents, Dante's Inferno was presented in 1,000-seat rented legitimate theatres

for $1. Indeed, the most influential of early feature films, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a

Nation ( 1915), opened a few years later in a noted New York City legitimate theatre and

ran for a year at an unheard of admission price of $2. In less than two decades the

industry had moved from selling movies as a novelty to developing a finely-honed

publicity machine to promote an entire system and its nationally advertised products.

Hollywood centred its promotional efforts on the star system. Publicists had to acquire the

art of manipulating the new techniques of mass advertising and mass communication to

create something special in the minds of the growing middle-class public. Stars provided

an effective means of differentiating feature films, making each individual title an

unmissable attraction. In 1909, for example, Carl Laemmle lured Florence Lawrence from

Biograph, and named her his 'IMP Girl' -- the letters representing his Independent Motion

Picture Company (later Universal). Laemmle then sent his star on tour and planted story

after story in the newspapers, including one falsely reporting her death.

Others plucked their stars from the legitimate stage. Adolph Zukor's pioneering company

Famous Players (later Paramount), whose slogan was 'Famous Players in Famous Plays',

achieved early successes with The Count of Monte Cristo ( 1912) starring James O'Neill,

The Prisoner of Zenda ( 1913) starring James Hackett, Queen Elizabeth ( 1912) starring

Sarah Bernhardt, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles starring Minnie Maddern Fiske.

Zukor soon saw the need to develop his own stars, not simply buy up already established

names. Mary Pickford saw her salary increase from $100 a week in 1909 to $10,000 per

week in 1917 as Zukor made her the biggest star of her day. Zukor's rivals developed their

own 'Little Marys', and 'inked' them to exclusive, long-run contracts. The Hollywood

companies then fashioned elaborately prepared scenarios as centrepieces for their stars.

But the stars were quick to realize that, if they were so important to the studios, they had

bargaining power of their own. Although many remained tied to exploitative contracts,

some of the most successful broke loose from the system. On 15 January 1919, major

luminaries Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford joined with director

D. W. Griffith to create United Artists, and issued a declaration of independence from

their former studio bosses. United Artists announced it would distribute starproduced

features so their makers could extract the riches their star power had generated.

United Artists achieved great success with, for example: The Mark of Zorro ( 1920,

Fairbanks), Robin Hood ( 1923, Fairbanks), Little Lord Fauntleroy ( 1921, Pickford), and

The Gold Rush ( 1925, Chaplin). Unfortunately, however, the studio did not regularly

release enough star-laden films, Theatre owners called for three Chaplin, Fairbanks, and

Pickford films per year, but the company was able to deliver only one every twenty-four

months. Theatre owners could not afford to go dark to wait for biennial inspirations, and

turned back to the majors. Thus, in the long run, United Artists simply became a haven for

independent producers (some good, some bad) fleeing from the strict confines of the

major Hollywood studios.

United Artists was an anomaly. The standard Hollywood system of feature film-making

sought to guarantee the shipment of attractive films to theatres on a weekly basis, and the

studios developed efficient and cost-effective production methods to produce films that

filled theatres. This factory system would prove the best method by which to provide a

regular supply of films.

In the days before the feature film, there had been two standard methods of production.

For 'reality' subjects, a camera operator would journey to the subject, record the action,

and then edit it together. For films inspired by vaudeville acts or taken from literary

sources, movie companies employed a director to stage 'scenes' and a camera operator to

record them. Gradually during the 1910s, as the demand for narrative films increased,

specialists were trained to assist the director to make movies faster. Writers thought up

story lines, scenic artists painted backgrounds, and designers fashioned appropriate

costumes.

Soon film-makers realized that it was less expensive to shoot the story out of order, rather

than chronologically record it as it might be staged in a theatre. Once all planned scenes

were filmed, an editor could reassemble them, following the dictates of the script. All this

required a carefully thought out, prearranged plan to calculate the minimum cost in

advance. Such a plan became known as the shooting script.

The Hollywood studio had to fashion shooting scripts which would turn out to be popular

at the box-office. Gradually, as feature films became longer, stories became more

complicated, requiring more complex shooting scripts. Paying careful attention to script

preparation meant faster and cheaper feature film-making. One could make a careful

estimate of the necessary footage for each scene, and film-makers developed techniques

to minimize the need for retakes.

William Cameron Menzies's sets for The Thief of Bagdad seen from the air in 1924.

The typical script immediately proclaimed its genre (comedy or drama, for example),

listed the cast of characters, and sketched a synopsis of the story, and only then went on to

a scene-by-scene scenario. From this plan, the head of the film company could decide

whether he wanted to make the movie. The producer could, once the project was

approved by the studio boss, redo the shooting script to fashion the actual order of

production.

The Hollywood production system was not invented, but evolved in response to a number

of felt imperatives, of which the most important was the need for regular and consistent

profit. A pioneering role, however, can be ascribed to producer Thomas Ince, working at

Mutual in 1913. The standard studio working procedure, as devised by Ince, involved a

studio boss, the film's director, and a continuity script. Once Ince as head producer had

approved a project, he assigned available buildings for filming, and commissioned writers

and production artists to create the necessary script, sets, and costumes. Back-up systems,

such as an internal police force to keep out crowds, or fire-fighters to assist when wooden

sets burned, meant that by the early 1920s studio lots, covering many acres, operated as

veritable subcities within the urban environs of Los Angeles.

Studio bosses planned a programme of films a year in advance. Sets were efficiently used

over and over again, and adapted for different stories. Art directors designed and

constructed sets; casting directors found the talent; make-up artists perfected the

glamorous movie look; and cinematographers were picked to shoot scripts as written.

Time was of the essence, so actors were shuttled from film to film. Often multiple

cameras were used for complicated shots (for example, a battlefield sequence) to avoid

having to stage them twice. And always present was the continuity clerk, who checked

that, when shooting was completed, the film could be easily reassembled.

DISTRIBUTION AND CONTROL OF THE MARKET

If Ince⊥ pioneered this Hollywood studio 'factory' production system, it was Adolph

Zukor who taught Hollywood how fully and properly to exploit it. By 1921 Zukor had

fashioned the largest film company in the world -- his Famous Players. Five years earlier

he had merged twelve producers and the distributor, Paramount, to form the Famous

Players-Lasky Corporation. By 1917 his new company included stars such as Mary

Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Pauline Frederick, and Blanche Sweet.

Two years later, about the time Pickford and Fairbanks left to form United Artists, a

quarter of the cinemas in the USA were regularly presenting Famous Players films.

Famous Players began to block book its yearly output of 50 to 100 feature films, which

meant that the theatre owner who sought to show the films of Mary Pickford had also to

take pictures featuring less well-known Famous Players stars. In turn, Famous Players

used these guaranteed bookings to test and develop new stars, and to try new story genres.

When major theatre owners began to baulk at the risks involved, Zukor stepped in,

acquired theatres, and set up his own theatre chain.

Such a large real estate venture needed more investment than could be financed with the

cash on hand. Zukor therefore turned to the Wall Street investment banking firm of Kuhn

Loeb for the necessary $10 million. At that time Kuhn Loeb was an outsider on Wall

Street, a small Jewish-run business in a world of WASP-dominated institutions. In time,

however, the company would grow into a financial giant, partly on the basis of deals with

expanding film companies from the west coast like Famous Players. Hollywood may have

been over 2,000 miles from New York City, but to gain crucial financing not available

from conservative west coast bankers, Zukor showed the industry that eastern money was

there to be tapped.

During the 1920s Famous Players became a high-flyer on the New York Stock Exchange.

Others soon followed. Marcus Loew put together Metro-Goldwyn-Maker. William Fox

expanded his film company as did Carl Laemmle with his Universal Studios. Even

stalwart independents United Artists built a theatre chain. Thus a handful of major,

vertically integrated companies came to dominate and define Hollywood.

It was not enough however, that this small handful of companies controlled all the movie

stars and theatres. They sought to expand their markets beyond the US border, to establish

distribution all over the world. The First World War offered a crucial opening. While other

national cinemas were constrained, the leading Hollywood companies moved to make the

world their marketplace. Although the average cost for Hollywood features of the day

rarely ranged beyond $500,000, expanding distribution across the globe meant revenues

regularly topped $1,000,000. Adolph Zukor, ever aggressive, led the way with a series of

spectacular foreign deals, and was able during the years prior to the coming of sound to

effect a stranglehold on the world-wide market-place.

To maintain conditions for maximizing profits abroad, the major Hollywood companies

formed an association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of

America (MPPDA), and hired former Postmaster-General Will H. Hays to keep these

international markets open. With Hays as an unofficial ambassador, assisted by a willing

US State Department under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, the MPPDA

fought to make sure that foreign countries permitted Hollywood corporations to operate

with an absence of constraint.

By the mid- 1920s, Hollywood dominated not only the major English-speaking markets

of Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, but most of continental Europe except for

Germany and the Soviet Union, and had successfully expanded into South America,

Central America, and the Caribbean. This crippled the development of rival studio

systems, except in isolated locations. For example, Japan at the time was not an

international trader, but a nation that kept to itself. Although Hollywood films were

popular with Japanese audiences, a native studio system was able to grow and rival

Hollywood in a way a British or French industry never could. Germany also retained

some degree of autonomy, though even this began to be undermined by the end of the

1920s, with Hollywood companies tempting away many leading German artists, and

striking deals with the major German company, Ufa.

In an attempt to limit Hollywood penetration, a number of nations enacted governmental

protection for their film industries. The Germans, followed by the French, devised the

'contingent system', whereby Hollywood imports were restricted to a certain number per

year. The British quota system, set up in 1927, was designed to set aside a certain

proportion of screen time for British films on the home market, but it was framed in such

a way that Hollywood companies were able to open up a production facility in Britain and

make films that would qualify as 'British'.

Indeed Hollywood's continued international monopoly forced film entrepreneurs in other

countries to struggle to please their native audiences, somehow to 'better' Hollywood. But

with their control of international distribution, the Hollywood corporations could and

would define appropriate standards of film style, form, content, and money-making.

Imitation would not work, however competitive the product.

THE PICTURE PALACE

The production and distribution of films constituted only two of the three essential pegs

of institutional Hollywood power. Movie moguls knew that money came through the

theatrical box-office and thus sought some measure of control over exhibition, the third

crucial sector of the film business. If ' Hollywood' was initially a group of California

studios and offices for distribution throughout the world, it also came to include a cluster

of movie palaces situated on main streets from New York to Los Angeles, Chicago to

Dallas, and, within a short time, London and Paris as well.

The modern movie palace era commenced in 1914 with Samuel 'Roxy' Rothapfel's

opening of the 3,000-seat Strand in 1914 in New York. Roxy combined a live vaudeville

show with movies. His vaudeville 'presentation' offered a little something extra that

attracted audiences away from more ordinary movie houses down the street. Roxy's

shows opened with a house orchestra of fifty musicians playing the national anthem. Then

came a newsreel, a travelogue, and a comic short, followed by the live stage show. Only

then came the feature film.

The movie palace itself was far more than just a theatre. The splendour of its architecture

and the 'touch of class' lent by the ubiquitous ushers evoked a high-class fantasyland.

Adolph Zukor soon caught on to Roxy's innovations and swooped in to purchase a string

of movie palace theatres, thus gaining control of a fully integrated system of motion

picture production, distribution, and exhibition.

Roxy was never able to sustain his economic enterprise and sold out. Chicago's Balaban

& Katz, however, developed an economic system for making millions of dollars from

their movie palace empire and, in the period immediately after the First World War,

pioneering exhibitors took their cue for maximizing profits from the extraordinary success

of this Chicago corporation. Indeed, Adolph Zukor approached Balaban & Katz and the

two operations merged and created Paramount Pictures in 1925, marking the true

affirmation of the Hollywood studio system in its three-part strategy of domination.

Balaban & Katz's success began when their Central Park Theatre opened in October 1917.

This mighty picture palace became an immediate success, and Sam Katz, as corporate

planner and president, put together a syndicate of backers who had all been wildly

successful with their own Chicago-based businesses: Julius Rosenwald, head of Sears-

Roebuck; William Wrigley, Jr., the chewing-gum magnate; and John Hertz, Chicago's taxi

king and later innovator of the rental car network. With this support, Balaban & Katz

expanded rapidly, leading the nascent movie exhibition business from a marginal leisure-

time industry to centre stage in the economy of entertainment.

Balaban & Katz devoted strategic care to the location of theatres. Until then, theatre

owners had chosen sites in the prevailing entertainment district. Balaban & Katz,

however, constructed their first three movie palaces in outlying business centres on the

edge of Chicago, away from the centre of town, selecting points at which the affluent

middle class could be expected to congregate. For them it was not enough simply to open

a movie house anywhere; one had to take the show to a transportation crossroads. Rapid

mass transit had enabled the middle class and the rich to move to the edge of the city to

the first true suburbs. It was this audience, able and willing to pay high prices for

luxurious shows, that Balaban & Katz set out to cultivate.

The architecture of the movie palace insulated the public from the outside world and

provided an opulent stage for the entertainment. The Chicago architectural firm headed by

the brothers George and C. W. Rapp designed the new-style theatres by mixing design

elements from nearly all past eras and contemporaneous locales, among them classic

French and Spanish designs and contemporary art deco renderings. Film-goers soon came

to expect triumphal arches, monumental staircases, and grand, column-lined lobbies

(inspired by the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles). Façades were equally dramatic. Strong

vertical lines were accentuated by ascending pilasters, windows, and towers, sweeping

high above the tiny adjacent shop-fronts. The actual theatre building was made from a

rigid, steel shell, on which plaster-made decorations hung in brilliant purples, golds,

azures, and crimsons. Massive steel trusses supported thousands of people in one or two

balconies.

Outside, colossal electric signs could be seen for miles. The upright signs towered several

storeys high, flashing forth their messages in several colours. Behind them, stained-glass

windows reflected the lights into the lobby, evoking an ecclesiastical atmosphere and

linking the theatre to the traditional, respected institutional architecture of the past.

Once inside, patrons weaved through a series of vestibules, foyers, lobbies, lounges,

promenades, and waiting rooms designed to impress and excite. The lobbies and foyers

were, if anything, more spectacular than the architectural fantasy outside. Decorations

included opulent chandeliers, classical drapery on walls and entrances, luxurious chairs

and fountains, and grand spaces for piano or organ accompaniment for waiting crowds.

And since there always seemed to be a queue, keeping newly arriving customers happy

was as important as entertaining those already seated. Inside the auditorium, everyone had

a perfect view of the screen, and careful acoustical planning ensured the orchestral

accompaniment to the silent films could be heard even in the furthest reaches of the

balcony.

One commentator compared these Balaban & Katz theatres to baronial halls or grand

hotels in which one might have tea or attend a ball. Balaban & Katz sought to make its

upwardly mobile patrons feel as if they had come home to the haunts of a modern

business tycoon.

Balaban & Katz offered free child care, rooms for smoking, and picture galleries in the

foyers and lobbies. In the basement of each movie palace a complete playground included

slides, sand-pits, and other objects of fun for younger children left in the care of nurses

while their parents upstairs enjoyed the show.

Ushers maintained a constant quiet decorum within the auditorium proper. They guided

patrons through the maze of halls and foyers, assisted the elderly and small children, and

handled any emergencies. Balaban & Katz recruited their corps from male college

students, dressed them in red uniforms with white gloves and yellow epaulettes, and

demanded they be obediently polite even to the rudest of patrons. All requests had to end

with a 'thank you'; under no circumstances could tips be accepted.

The Balaban & Katz stage shows outdid even Roxy by developing local talent into stars'

to equal Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin. The shows were elaborate mini-musicals with

spectacular settings and intricate lighting effects. They celebrated holidays, fads of the

day, heroic adventures, and all the highlights of the Roaring Twenties from the Charleston

to the exploits of Charles Lindbergh to the new medium of radio. For their orchestras and

organists, who provided music for the silent films, Balaban & Katz also depended on a

star system. Jesse Crawford became an organist as well known as any Chicagoan of the

1920s. In 1923 his wedding to fellow organist Helen Anderson was the talk of Chicago's

tabloids. When Sam Katz took the pair to New York, the Chicago newspapers mourned

the loss in the same way they would the departure of a sports hero.

Most of the features described above could be easily copied by any theatre chain willing

to make the necessary investment. One part of the Balaban & Katz show, however, was

unique. Balaban & Katz offered the first air-conditioned movie theatres in the world,

providing summertime comfort no middle-class citizen in the sweltering Midwestern

states could long resist. After 1926 most important movie palaces either installed air

conditioning or built the new theatre around it.

There had been crude experiments with blowing air across blocks of ice, but prior to

Balaban & Katz's Central Park Theatre most movie houses simply closed during the

summer or opened to tiny crowds. The movie palace airconditioning apparatus took up an

entire basement room with more than 15,000 feet of heavy-duty pipe, giant

240horsepower electric motors, and two 1,000-pound flywheels.

Soon summer became the peak movie-going season. With its five-part strategy -- location,

architecture, service, stage shows, and air conditioning -- Balaban & Katz set the scene

for a redefinition of movie-going in the USA. The rest of the world followed cautiously,

adopting or adapting some features of the new system as circumstances permitted. In

most European cities prime sites for movie theatres continued to be in the traditional

entertainment districts, though in Britain at least a number of wellequipped and opulent

theatres were opened in the developing suburbs of major cities. In poorer countries and

those with more equable climates air conditioning was an expensive luxury, and summer

film-going never became as popular elsewhere as it did in North America. Hollywood

took advantage of this to phase the release of major films, bringing them out on the

domestic market in the summer and elsewhere in the world in the autumn.

With the merger with Famous Players, Sam Katz successfully transferred the Balaban &

Katz system to Paramount's national chain of theatres. Other companies quickly followed

suit: Marcus Loew with MGM, and Warner Bros. with their First National chain. But

none could rival the success of Adolph Zukor and Paramount. As the silent era drew to a

close, it was Zukor and Paramount who had the top stars, the most world-wide

distribution, and the most extensive and prestigious theatre chain -- the very model of the

integrated business through which Hollywood's power was asserted.

This Hollywood system crested in the heady days prior to the Great Depression.

Hollywood as an industrial institution had come to dominate the world of popular

entertainment as no institution had before. The coming of sound simply eliminated

competition from the stage and vaudeville. But change was on its way, precipitated by the

Depression and by the rise of the new technologies of radio and television. Hollywood at

the end of the 1920s and throughout the 1930s was faced by a series of shocks -falling

audiences, the loss of some overseas markets, threats of censorship, and anti-monopoly

legislation. But it adjusted and survived, thanks to the solid foundations laid by its

pioneers.

Bibliography

Balio, Tino (ed.) ( 1985), The American Film Industry.

Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), The Classical Hollywood

Cinema.

Gomery, Douglas ( 1986), The Hollywood Studio System.

-- ( 1992), Shared Pleasures.

Hampton, Benjamin B. ( 1931), A History of the Movies.

Jobs, Gertrude ( 1966), Motion Picture Empire.

Koszarski, Richard ( 1990), An Evening's Entertainment.

The World-Wide Spread of Cinema

RUTH VASEY

The world-wide spread of cinema has been dominated by the distribution and exhibition

of Hollywood movies, despite the fact that film production has taken place around the

world since the turn of the century. The first means of film production and projection

were developed virtually simultaneously in France, Germany, and the United States in

about 1895, with the earliest films typically comprising single shots of single scenes or

incidents. Many of these early movies delighted audiences with their authentic rendering

of snippets of 'reality', and French innovators Auguste and Louis Lumière seized upon the

commercial possibilities inherent in the documentary capacities of the new medium. They

trained a team of cameramen/projectionists to demonstrate their Cinématographe

internationally, recording new footage as they went. By the end of July 1896 they had

carried the invention to London, Vienna, Madrid, Belgrade, New York, St Petersburg, and

Bucharest, creating widespread interest with their cinematic revelations of both the exotic

and the familiar. By the end of the year they had been around the world, introducing the

phenomenon of cinema to Egypt, India, Japan, and Australia. In the mean time Thomas

Edison's projector, the Vitascope, was also popularizing the medium in the United States

and Europe.

At the turn of the century motion picture production was essentially a cottage industry,

accessible to any enthusiastic entrepreneur with a modicum of capital and know-how. The

world's first feature film of over an hour's duration was made not in France or America

but in Australia, where The Story of the Kelly Gang was produced in 1906, the theatrical

company J. & N. Tait made the film without the benefit of any industrial infrastructure

whatsoever. By 1912 Australia had produced thirty features, and feature-length

productions had also been made in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary

(with fourteen features in 1912 alone), Italy, Japan, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, the

United States, and Yugoslavia.

Despite the energy and commitment represented by this early flurry of film-making,

singular achievements in the area of production were to prove less important than

innovations in business organization in determining the shape of international film

commerce. Again France was the first to seize the initiative in terms of foreign

distribution. By 1908 the production company Pathé-Fèrres had established a network of

offices to promote its products-mainly short dramas and comic scenarios -- in areas

including western and eastern Europe, Russia, India, Singapore, and the United States

itself. In fact, in 1908 Pathé was the largest single supplier of films for the American

market. Films by other French companies, as well as British, Italian, and Danish

productions, were also circulating internationally at this time. By contrast, relatively scant

foreign business was conducted by American production houses. Although the American

companies Vitagraph and Edison were represented in Europe, their agents were more

interested in buying European films for circulation in America than in promoting their

own products abroad.

HOLLYWOOD'S RISE TO DOMINANCE

If there was little early sign of America's future dominance in the foreign field, the

streamlining of the American industry's business organization in its home market was

laying the foundations of its economic strength in the first fifteen years of the century.

The motion picture market within the United States was, and has remained, by far the

most lucrative in the world. In the years prior to the First World War American producers

concentrated on consolidating that market under their own control. As Kristin Thompson (

1985) points out, the relatively late entry of the Americans into serious international film

commerce can be put down to the more ready profits waiting to be exploited in the

domestic arena; the French market, by contrast, was relatively small, so it did not take

French producers long to look abroad for new audiences for their products. The sheer size

of the American exhibition field encouraged the application of standardized business

practices, including increasingly systematic and efficient methods of production and

distribution. Although a fully vertically integrated system of industrial organization did

not emerge until the 1920s, the various branches of the industry were already tending

towards combination in the 1910s. With the majority of economic power concentrated in

the hands of relatively few players, the larger companies could afford to act as an

exclusive oligopoly, collectively protecting the interests of existing corporations at the

expense of newcomers -- either domestic or international -- with the result that after 1908

it became increasingly difficult for foreign companies to gain access to the American

exhibition field. The implications of this situation for the subsequent history of world

cinema were extremely far-reaching. It meant that the American producers eventually had

consistent and virtually exclusive access to their own exceptionally lucrative market,

enabling them to recoup most of the costs of expensive productions, or to go into profit,

even before entering overseas distribution. As a result, the American industry could

produce highly capitalized productions that outperformed their international rivals in

terms of both production values and reliability of supply. Moreover, with costs largely

being recovered in the domestic sphere, even the most lavish American productions could

be offered to foreign exhibitors at affordable prices. In retrospect, it is apparent that the

effective control of the domestic market by American producers was the factor that

resulted in much of the world's motion picture commerce becoming a one-way affair.

Nevertheless, in the years prior to the First World War the inevitability of this outcome

was by no means clear, either to American producers or to the Europeans, who were

enjoying considerable success in the international arena. Frenchman Max Linder, working

for Pathé, was probably the world's most popular comedian, not yet facing competition

from Hollywood clowns such as Chaplin or Keaton. The Danish company Nordisk was

distributing 370 films a year by 1913, making it second only to Pathé in terms of

international sales; its star, Asta Nielsen, enjoyed widespread international success. Italy

was producing the most notable spectaculars on the world scene, making grand historical

epics such as Quo vadis? ( Enrico Guazzoni , 1913). Even when the war disrupted film

industries across western Europe, and closed all but domestic markets to French

production, the Americans were slow to expand their foreign sales: rather than dealing

directly with the majority of their foreign customers, they allowed most of their overseas

business to be conducted by foreign sales agents who re-exported American movies from

London to destinations around the world. It was not until 1916, when the British imposed

tariffs on foreign film trade, that the centre of movie distribution shifted from London to

New York. The consequent increase in American control over foreign sales and rentals

encouraged producers and distributors to take a more active and involved stance in

foreign trade.

Between 1916 and 1918 the extent of the American industry's representation overseas

increased markedly. Some companies preferred to sign agents overseas to act on their

behalf, while others formed subsidiary branches to handle foreign distribution. Universal,

which had established distribution facilities in Europe before the war, initiated new

branches in the Far East, while Fox established a combination of agencies and branches in

Europe, South America, and Australia. Famous Players-Lasky and Goldwyn both worked

through agencies in South Africa, South America, Australia, Scandinavia, Central

America, and Europe. While these patterns of expansion involved a measure of

competition, particularly in Europe, it is notable that between them these four companies

managed to encircle virtually the entire globe with regional networks. In 1920 American

exports of exposed film stood at 175,233,000 feet, five times the pre-war figure. From

this time onward the industry could depend on at least 35 per cent of its gross income

arising from foreign sources. With the formerly powerful industries of France and Italy

greatly reduced, the American companies found themselves in an unaccustomed position

of international supremacy.

Throughout the silent period the American industry received assistance in its foreign

operations from the Departments of State and Commerce. US consular offices co-

operated in gathering a wealth of information relevant to motion picture trade, including

audience preferences, conditions affecting exhibition, and activities of competitors. In

1927 Will Hays, president of the industry's trade association (the Motion Picture

Producers and Distributors of America), successfully lobbied Congress for the

establishment of a Motion Picture Department within the Department of Commerce, on

the grounds that movies acted as 'silent salesmen' of American goods to audiences world-

wide. Rewriting the nineteenth-century imperialist slogan that trade followed the flag,

Hays proclaimed that now 'Trade Follows the Films'. Indeed, it seems likely that

Hollywood's conspicuous display of material affluence was itself a factor attractive to

audiences, both at home and abroad.

PROTECTIONISM

While Hollywood's flair for unofficial advertising may have won it friends amongst

popular audiences and the US Congress, it also stirred up opposition to the American

product amongst foreign governments. In 1927 the British government expressed concern

that only 5 per cent of films shown in the British Empire were of Empire origin, while the

vast majority were American, reflecting American values and showcasing American

goods. A parliamentary inquiry concluded that the Empire would be better served by films

reflecting values and products of an Imperial stamp. Arguments about the cultural

influence of Hollywood were part of a pervasive discourse of antiAmericanism among

European cultural élites. Bourgeois cultural nationalists feared the homogenizing

influence of American mass culture, in which previously clear representations of class and

nationality, such as costume and gesture, became increasingly undifferentiated. Ironically,

the pervasiveness of Hollywood itself served as an impetus behind government initiatives

to support film-making in Britain, as was equally the case in many other countries. Quite

apart from ideological issues, large profits were at stake in box-office revenues: Britain

constituted the most lucrative market in the world outside the United States, generating

$165 million at the box-office in 1927. Its own level of film production in that year stood

at forty-four features (4.85 per cent of films shown), compared to the 723 (81 per cent)

that were imported from the USA. In France, the proportion of domestically produced

product exhibited was slightly higher, with 74 French features being shown (12.7 per

cent) compared with 368 American imports (63.3 per cent).

The only European nation in which domestic production exceeded imports in the late

1920s was Germany. Commercial film production had begun to develop in Germany from

about 1911, but it was not conspicuous amongst early European producers. During the

World War the country's isolation from French, British, Italian, and American sources of

film supply encouraged domestic production. With an eye to both the entertainment and

the propaganda values of the medium, the German government helped to underwrite the

development of the local industry. A merger of several companies brought about the

formation of the large combine Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft, or Ufa, which was

secretly funded by the State. In addition to its studio facilities (which included a state-of-

the-art complex that was constructed in 1921 at Neubabelsberg near Potsdam) it also

served as a distributor, handling the products of other German studios in addition to its

own output. In the 1920s it continued to make capital acquisitions, including the Danish

company Nordisk and its foreign cinema circuits: unlike France, which by now

concentrated mainly on production for domestic consumption, Germany remained

committed to expansion in the foreign field. Indeed, it needed receipts from foreign

markets to support its level of production. The number of features produced peaked at 646

in 1921 (compared to 854 produced by Hollywood in that year), and thereafter declined to

about 200 films a year, or roughly a third of Hollywood's output, at the end of the decade.

Germany was at the forefront of initiatives that were designed to counter Hollywood's

hegemony in Europe. In 1925, when the American share of the German market was on the

increase, the government responded by instituting a 'contingent' plan that was designed to

limit the proportion of foreign films that were exhibited in the German domestic market.

In effect, the new regulation stated that only as many films could be imported each year

as were produced within Germany. In 1927 German studios produced a total of 241

features, which amounted to 46.3 per cent of the total number of films exhibited in that

year. American imports amounted to only 36.8 per cent, with the remainder being drawn

from a variety of other foreign sources. The 'contingent' paved the way for many similar

kinds of protective legislation by the filmproducing nations of Europe: Austria, Hungary,

France, Britain, and Australia all introduced quota legislation of some kind in the late

1920s. The British Films Act of 1928, for example, specified a gradual increase in the

proportion of domestically produced film to be distributed in the British market,

beginning with 7.5 per cent in the first year.

There were many difficulties inherent in making such regulations work smoothly,

especially in countries where infrastructure for film-making was less advanced than it was

in Germany. In trying to formulate appropriate protectionist measures, governments were

forced to perform delicate balancing acts between the economic and cultural imperatives

of production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption. Probably the most intransigent

problem was that exhibitors in most countries favoured American movies, for obvious

reasons: they arrived like clockwork and they made profits. In every country (including

the United States) investment in sites of exhibition amounted to more than total

investment in production. The culturally based protectionist arguments of producers

therefore had to contend with weighty resistance from exhibitor lobbies which sought to

retain unrestricted access to American material. Another problem was that quotas could

result in the production of rapid, substandard films (often funded by national subsidiaries

of Hollywood studios) designed simply to meet the regulations and allow for the

concomitant importation of the maximum number of American products. 'Quota quickies',

as they were known in Britain, simply had the effect of eroding the prestige of the local

product.

BRITAIN AND THE EMPIRE

Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were hopeful that British quota legislation could

lead to a 'film-buying' group amongst the film-producing members of the British Empire,

perhaps countering some of the advantages of America's exclusive home market. The

requirement that Empire films should be afforded certain minimum amounts of screen

time in Britain raised the possibility that countries throughout the Empire would benefit

first through the exhibition of their films in the British Isles and secondly through their

mutual distribution throughout the other countries of the Empire. In practice, however,

this arrangement favoured the products of the relatively highly capitalized British

industry, and did very little to boost production in other countries. Empire countries

remained overwhelmingly dependent upon imported films, most of which were American.

In 1927, 87 per cent of Australian and New Zealand film imports originated in

Hollywood, compared with 5 per cent from Britain and 8 per cent from other countries. In

Canada the proportion of American product was even higher, possibly reaching over 98

per cent. Hollywood's Canadian business was integrated into the domestic US distribution

network to the extent that American distributors typically classified Canadian revenue as

domestic income. In India at least 80 per cent of films shown in the late 1920s were

American, even though twenty-one studios manufactured local films, eight or nine of

them in regular production. (Although its narrow range of distribution restricted its

cinematic and social influence, Indian film production later burgeoned, with production

levels exceeding those of any other country, including the United States, from the 1970s

on.)

Australia had the remarkable distinction of being the world's leading importer of

Hollywood film footage in 1922, 1926, 1927, and 1928. However, this does not imply

that Australia was the American industry's most lucrative customer nation during those

years. The relative importance of markets as generators of revenue for Hollywood's

coffers depended upon a range of factors including population size, per capita income,

distribution costs, and rates of foreign exchange. In the final analysis, Britain was always

Hollywood's most important foreign market, generating approximately 30 per cent of

foreign income in the late 1920s. In 1927 it was followed in importance by Australasia

(15 per cent), France (8.5 per cent), Argentina and Uruguay (7.5 per cent), Brazil (7 per

cent), and Germany (5 per cent).

FILM EUROPE

The idea of countering America's dominance abroad through co-operative international

action gained some currency in Europe in the 1920s. The so-called 'Film Europe'

movement consisted of various European initiatives, carried out between 1924 and 1928,

aimed at joint production and reciprocal distribution of films in the European sphere. Film

production on a small scale was carried out all over Europe in the 1920s: for example, in

1924 feature films were made in Austria (30 films), Belgium (4), Denmark (9), Finland

(4), Greece (1), Hungary (9), the Netherlands (6), Norway (1), Poland (8), Romania (1),

Spain (10), Sweden (16), and Switzerland (3). However, the major participants in Film

Europe were the principal producers of western Europe: Germany (228), France (73), and

Great Britain (33). The general idea was to create a kind of cinematic Common Market by

breaking down sales barriers to European movies within Europe, allowing a larger base

for production than any nation could manage individually. Ideally, the movement would

give European producers dominance within their own region as a prelude to a renewed

push into the wider global market. In 1924 an arrangement for mutual distribution

between Ufa and the French company établissements Aubert raised hopes that co-

operative ventures would gather momentum, but other deals were slow to eventuate. In

1925 the solidarity of the movement was shaken when Ufa ran into financial difficulties

and was bailed out by American studios; part of the settlement of the loan required that a

specified number of films by Paramount and MGM be given exhibition in Germany,

while Ufa films were given reciprocal distribution in the United States. Production and

distribution within Europe did increase at the expense of Hollywood as a result of the

'contingent' and quota arrangements of the late 1920s, but the change was never dramatic.

As hompson ( 1985) shows, France benefited least: when American imports fell in any of

the participating countries the difference was made up mainly with German films, and a

few from Britain.

If silent films had remained the norm, perhaps Film Europe would have continued to gain

ground, but it could not survive the introduction of sound. The effect of talking pictures

was to splinter this incipient unity into its component language groups. Any sense of

cohesion that had arisen from the shared determination to resist the American industry

was undermined by the local cultural imperative of hearing the accents of one's own

language. In Italy, for example, a law was passed in 1929 prohibiting the projection of a

movie in any language other than Italian, and similar strictures were temporarily instituted

in Portugal and Spain. Disastrously for the producers in France and Germany, they found

themselves alienated from the highly lucrative British market, leaving that field wide

open for the Americans. British manufacturers themselves adopted sound film production

with enthusiasm, but were now more interested in the ready-made Englishspeaking

market of the British Empire than in the problematic European arena. They were also

quick to recognize new potential for trade in the American market, and were inclined to

enter into deals across the Atlantic rather than across the English Channel. Several

Hollywood companies, including Warner Bros., United Artists, Universal, and RKO,

organized tie-ups with producers in England or entered into production there themselves,

encouraged by the need to secure product to satisfy the British quota.

The USSR was not directly involved in Film Europe, although some Soviet films found

their way into European circulation through the agency of a German Communist

organization (the Internationale Arbeitershilfe). The relationship of the Soviet film

industry to Hollywood output was quite different from that of the western Europeans: for

a few years in the early and mid-1920s American product was welcomed for its revenue-

raising potential. Since the whole industry was nationalized, profits earned at the box-

office could be put straight back into Soviet film production. The stream of imports was

reduced to a trickle after 1927 when Soviet films first generated more revenue than

imported products, and in the 1930s imports virtually ceased altogether. For their part,

Soviet movies gained very limited exposure in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s

through the New York office of the distributor Amkino.

Japanese films did not generally receive any international exposure at all. Yet, amazingly,

in the years 192232 Japan was the world's leading producer of feature films. Interest in

film had been strong amongst the Japanese since the inception of the medium, and

domestic business was profitable. Japanese studios reputedly manufactured 875 features

in 1924 -- some 300 more than the USA in the same year -- marketing them all

exclusively within its own domestic sphere. The five major companies were vertically

integrated, and so wielded decisive control over their industry much as the major studios

did in the United States. Cinemas tended to show either Japanese or foreign products but

not both, and the majority of theatres catered to the less expensive local product.

Although Hollywood companies were well represented in Japan, the Americans probably

only enjoyed about 11 per cent of the market in the late 1920s, with European movies

comprising a considerably smaller share.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE WORLD MARKET

The Japanese motion picture, designed for an audience conspicuous in its cultural

homogeneity, may never have had a future as a product for export. On the other hand, the

American product seems to have been universally well received.

Will Hays liked to explain the movies' popularity in terms of their historical appeal to the

polyglot immigrant communities of the large American cities; he claimed that American

producers necessarily developed a style of filmic communication that was not dependent

upon literacy or other specific cultural qualifications. Perhaps popular audiences were

attracted by fast-paced action and the optimistic, democratic outlook that had always

characterized American films, as well as by their unusually high production values. The

structure of the American domestic market itself supported the high capitalization of

American movies, since controlled distribution practices discouraged overproduction and

led to relatively high levels of investment in each individual project. At the same time,

foreign receipts were an integral part of Hollywood's economic structure in the 1920s, and

the studios therefore consciously tailored aspects of their output to the tastes of foreign

consumers. The higher the budget of the movie, the more comprehensively the foreign

market needed to be taken into account. Smaller films did not have to be shown

everywhere to make their money back, and consequently had to make fewer allowances

for foreign sensibilities. The most obvious concession to foreign tastes in 'prestige'

productions lay in the selection and promotion of stars with international drawing power.

Foreign audiences often responded particularly warmly to their own compatriots when

they appeared in the full international context of the Hollywood industry. When

Hollywood producers 'poached' acting talent from other national industries it not only

weakened their competitors, it also recruited the affections and loyalties of foreign

populations. Examples of European actors who were to be contracted to Hollywood

studios include Charles Laughton, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Boyer,

Robert Donat, Greta Garbo, and many others. Garbo constitutes a particularly

conspicuous example of the influence of foreign tastes. Although she is remembered

today as the quintessential screen goddess of the late 1920s and 1930s, she was never

overwhelmingly popular in the United States. Her reputation depended upon her immense

following abroad, and her films consistently depended upon the foreign market to take

them into profit.

It was not just actors who were recruited from foreign industries, but also technical

workers of all kinds, notably directors and cameramen. It was a logical business move for

an industry that could afford it to buy up the best staff in the world. As a tactic, there was

a capitalist elegance about it: only the strongest national industries could offer the training

and experience that would make a technician attractive to Hollywood. Once the

acquisition had been made not only was the American industry inherently strengthened

but its most immediate competitors were proportionately weakened. The industry's

explanation for this policy was that it allowed producing companies to make products best

fitted for international consumption. For example, Hays talked about 'drawing into the

American art industry the talent of other nations in order to make it more truly universal',

and this explanation is not wholly fatuous. Whether or not it was the original intention

behind Hollywood's voracious programme of acquisition, the fact that the studios

contained many émigrés (predominantly European) probably allowed a more international

sensibility to inform the production process. Whatever the reasons, Hollywood's

particular achievement was to design a product that travelled well. Even considering the

studios' corporate might, without this factor American movies could not have become the

most powerful and pervasive cultural force in the world in the 1920s.

In addition to the explosion of film commerce that characterized the first three decades of

the century, the silent period was also marked by the widespread circulation of cinematic

ideas. No national cinematic style developed in isolation. Just as the Lumières'

apprentices carried the fundamentals of the art around the globe within a year, new

approaches to filmic expression continued to find their way abroad, whether or not they

were destined for widespread commercial release. The German and French industries may

not have been able to compete with the Americans abroad, but their products nevertheless

circulated in Europe, Japan, China, and many other markets. The Soviets professed their

admiration for Griffith even as they developed their theories of montage, while Mary

Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were held spellbound by Eisenstein's Battleship

Potemkin ( 1925). By the time sound arrived, cinema all around the world was already

capable of speaking many languages.

Bibliography

Jarvie, Ian ( 1992), Hollywood's Overseas Campaign.

Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), Exporting Entertainment.

Vasey, Ruth ( 1995), Diplomatic Representations: The World According to Hollywood,

1919-1939.

Rudolph Valentio (1895-1926)

On 18 July 1926, the Chicago Tribune published an unsigned editorial that railed against

a pink powder machine supposedly placed in a men's washroom on Chicago's North Side.

Blame for 'this degeneration into effeminacy' was laid at the feet of a movie star then

appearing in the city to promote his latest film: Rudolph Velentino. The muscular star

challenged the anonymous author of the 'Pink Powder Puff' attack to a boxing match, but

the editor failed to show. Nevertheless, the matter would be settled, in a way, the

following month. On 23 August the 31-year-old star died at New York City's Polyclinic of

complications from an ulcer operation.

Following Valentino's unexpected death, the vitriolic response of American men to

Valentino was temporarily put aside as women, long regarded as the mainstay of the star's

fans, offered public proof of their devotion to the actor. The New York Times reported a

crowd of some 30,000, 'in large part women and girls,' who stood in the for hours to

glimpse the actor's body lying in state at Campbell's Funeral Church. These mourners

caused, noted the Times, 'rioting . . . without precedent in New York'. The funerary

hysteria, including reports of suicides, led the Vatican to issue a statement condemning

the 'Collective madness, incarnating the tragic comedy of a new fetishism'.

The tango from Rex Ingram's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Valentino was not the first star constructed to appeal to women; but in the years that

followed his death his impact on women would be inscribed as Hollywood legned. The

name of Rudolph Valentino remains one of the few from the Hollywood silent era that

still reverberates in the public imagination; a cult figure with an aura of exotic sexual

ambiguity. Valentino's masculinity had been held suspect in the 1920s because of his

former employment as a paid dancing companion, because of his sartorial excess, and

because of his apparent capitulation to a strong-willed life, the controversial dancer and

production designer Natasha Rambova. To many, Valentino seemed to epitomize the

dreaded possibilities of a 'woman-made' masculinity, much discussed and denounced in

anti-feminist tracts, general interest magazines, and popular novels of the time.

Valentino came to the United States from Italy in 1913 as a teenager. After becoming a

professional dancer in the cafés of New York City, he ventured out to California in 1917,

where he entered the movies in bit parts and graduated to playing the stereotype of the

villainous foreign seducer. Legend has it that June Mathis, an influential scriptwriter for

Metro, saw his film Eyes of Youth ( 1919), and suggested him for the role of the doomed

playboy hero in Rex Ingram's production of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

( 1921). The film became a huge hit; by some reports it was Hollywood's biggest box-

office draw of the entire decade.

Through the films that followed Valentino came to represent, in the words of Adela

Rogers St Johns, 'the lure of the flesh', he male equivalent of the vamp. Valentino's exotic

ethnicity was deliberately exploited by Hollywood as the source of controversy, as was

the 'Vogue of Valentino' among women, discussed in the press as a direct threat to

American men. The hit movie The Sheik ( 1921) made Valentino a top star and sealed his

seductive image, but he was not satisfied with playing 'the sheikh' forever, and began to

demand different roles. After a sensitive performance in Blood and Sand ( 1922) and his

appearance in other, less memorable films (like Beyond the Rocks and Moran of the Lady

Letty, both 1922), Valentino was put on suspension by Famous Players-Lasky because of

his demand for control over his productions. During his absence from the screen,

Valentino adroitly proved his continuing popularity with a successful dance tour for

Mineralava facial clay. He returned to the screen in a meticulously produced costume

drama, Monsieur Beaucaire ( 1924), in which he gives a wonderfully nuanced

performance as a duke who masquerades as a fake duke who masquerades as a barber.

Valentino's best performances, as in Monsieur Beaucaire and The Eagle ( 1925), stress his

comic talents and his ability to move expressively. These performances stand in contrast

to the clips that circulate of Valentino's work (especially from The Sheik) that suggest he

was an overactor whose brief career was sustained only by his beauty and the sexual

idolatry of female fans. However, the limited success of Monsieur Beaucaire outside

urban areas would prove (at least to the studio) that Madam Valentino's control over her

'henpecked' husband was a danger to box-office receipts. After a couple of disappointing

films and separation from his wife, a Valentino 'come-back' was offered with the expertly

designed and directed The Eagle, cleverly scripted by frequent Lubitsch collaborator Hans

Kräly. Ironically, Valentino's posthumously released last film, The Son of the Sheik,

would be a light-hearted parody of the vehicle that had first brought 'The Great Lover's to

fame only five years before.

GAYLYN STUDLAR SELECT FILMOGRAPHY The Four Horsemen of the

Apocalypse ( 1921); The Sheik ( 1921); Blood and Sand ( 1922); Monsieur Beaucaire

( 1924); The Eagle ( 1925); The Son of the Sheik ( 1926)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hansen, Miriam ( 1991), Babel and Banylon.

Morris, Michael ( 1991), Madam Valentino.

Studlar, Gaylyn ( 1993), 'Valentino, "Optic Introxication" and Dance Madness'.

Walker, Alexander ( 1976), Valentino.

Joseph M. Schenck (1877-1961)

Among the figures who rose to power as Hollywood moguls during the studio period,

Joseph M. Schenck and his younger brother Nicholas had perhaps the most remarkable (if

chequered) careers. In their heyday the two brothers between them ran two major studios;

while Joe Schenck operated from behind the scenes as first the head of United Artists and

later that of Twentieth Century-Fox, Nick ran Loew's Inc. and its world famous

subsidiary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Like most movie moguls, the Schencks were immigrants - in their case from Russia. They

came to the USA in 1892 and grew up in New York City, where they built up a successful

amusement park business. They prospered and in time merged with vaudeville act

supplier Loew's.

Nick Schenck rose to the presidency of Loew's, a position he held for a quarter of a

century. Joe, on the other hand, was more independent and struck out on his own. By the

early 1920s he had relocated to Hollywood and was managing the careers of Roscoe

(Fatty) Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, and the three Talmadge sisters.

Joe married Norma Talmadge in 1917 while Keaton married Natalie, and through the

1920s the Schenck-Keaton - Talmadge 'extended family' ranked at the top of the

Hollywood pantheon of celebrity and power. After his divorce in 1929 Schenck played

the role of the bachelor of Hollywood's golden era, acting as mentor to, and having

rumoured affairs with, stars from Merle Oberon to Marilyn Monroe.

Joe Schenck (right) posing with D. W. Griffith before the making of Abraham Lincoln ( 1930)

Through the 1920s Joe Schenck formed a close association with United Artists, through

which many of the stars he managed distributed their films. He joined in November 1924

as president. Even as company head, however, he continued to work with the artists he

had sponsored, producing a number of their films, including Buster Keaton's The General

( 1927) and Steamboat Bill Jr. ( 1928)

In 1933 he created his own production company Twentieth Century Pictures, partnered

with Darryl F. Zanuck and backed financially by brother Nick at Loew's Inc. When

Twentieth Century merged with Fox two years later, Joe retained control, thanks again to

his brother's financial support. Thereafter, as Zanuck cranked out the pictures, Joe

Schenck worked behind the scenes, co-ordinating world-wide distribution and running

Twentieth Century-Fox's international chain of theatres.

Through the late 1930s Schenk and other studio heads (including brother Nick) paid

bribes to Willie Bioff of the projectionists' union to keep their theatres open. In time

government investigators unearthed this racketeering, and convicted Bioff. One movie

mogul had to go to gaol, to take the fall for the others. Convicted of perjury, Schenk spent

four months and five days in a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut; in 1945 he was

pardoned and cleared on all charges by President Harry Truman.

The Schenk brothers hung on, through the bitter economic climate of the 1950s; through a

period where the methods that they had employed for nearly thirty years were mocked as

obsolete. With new audiences and new competition from television, the Schencks

ungracefully lost their positions of power. Ever the deal-maker, during the 1950s Schenck

and longtime friend Mike Todd signed up a widescreen process called Todd-AO, and

produced Oklahoma! ( 1955) and a number of other topdrawer films. Yet, at the end, old

age finally slowed Schenck, and he died in Hollywood a bitter old man, living at the edge

of an industry he had helped to create.

More than the bribery conviction, this woeful ending to their magisterial careers has

robbed the brothers Schenck of their proper due in histories of film. Both deserve praise

for building Hollywood into the most powerful film business in the world during the

1920s and 1930s.

DOUGLAS GOMERY

SELECT FILMOGRAPHY

As producer

Salome ( 1918); The Navigator ( 1924); Camille ( 1927); The General ( 1927); Eternal

Love ( 1929); Abraham Lincoln ( 1930); DuBarry: Woman of Passion ( 1930)

Sid Grauman (1879-1950)

During the 1920s there was no single movie exhibitor in the United States more famous

than Sid Grauman and no theatre more famous than Grauman's Chinese on Hollywood

Boulevard. Sidney Patrick Grauman revelled in his status as movie palace mogul,

flamboyant in every respect, right down to his courtyard of world famous impressions in

cement.According to legend, Norma Talmadge stepped into a block of wet cement while

visiting the Chinese Theatre during its construction, and thus was born the greatest of

theatrical publicity tools. In time Gene Autry brought his horse Champion to imprint four

hooves alongside cement impressions of Al Jolson's knee, John Barrymore's profile, Tom

Mix's ten-gallon hat, and Harold Lloyd's glasses. Grauman should also be remembered for

his innovation of the stage show prologue; live shows, preceding silent films, thematically

linked to the narrative of the feature. During the late 1920s Grauman was justifiably

world famous for these prologues. Before Cecil B. De Mille 's King of Kings ( 1927),

Grauman had a cast of more than 100 play out five separate biblical scenes to fascinate

and delight the audience. Sid Grauman first tasted show business working with his father

in tent shows during the 1898 Yokon Gold Rush. Temporarily rich, David Grauman

moved the family to San Francisco and entered the nascent film industry during the first

decade of the twentieth century. Father and son turned a plain San Francisco store-front

into the ornate and highly profitable Unique Theatre. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake

destroyed the competition and from a fresh start the Graumans soon became powers in the

local film exhibition business.Young Sid moved to Los Angeles to make his own mark on

the world, and a decade later, in February 1918, opened the magnificent Million Dollar

Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. The Million Dollar stood as the first great movie

palace west of Chicago, an effective amalgamation of Spanish colonial design elements

with Byzantine touches to effect an almost futurist design. In 2,400 seats citizens of Los

Angeles could witness the best screen efforts nearby Hollywood companies were

producing. Four years later Grauman followed up this success with his Egyptian Theatre

on Hollywood Boulevard.But the Chinese Theatre was Sid Grauman's crowning personal

statement. At the grand opening on 19 May 1927, D. W. Griffith and Mary Pickford were

present to praise Grauman's achievement. Outside a green bronze pagoda roof towered

some 90 feet above an entrance that mimicked an oriental temple. Inside a central

sunburst pendant chandelier hung 60 feet above 2,000 seats in a flame red auditorium

with accents of jade, gold, and classic antique Chinese art reproductions.Even Grauman's

considerable theatrical skills proved inadequate as the Hollywood film industry acquired

control of the exhibition arm of the movie business. During the Great Depression

Hollywood needed managers who followed orders from central office, not pioneering

entrepreneurs, and the coming of sound made Grauman's prologues passé. By 1930 the

powerful Fox studio, located only a few miles closer to the Pacific Ocean, owned the

Chinese Theatre, and Sid Grauman, showman extraordinary, friend of silent picture stars,

was just another employee.Through the 1930s and 1940s Grauman grew more and more

famous in the eyes of the movie-going public, but his heyday was over. Grauman was like

the stars uptown, under contract, taking orders from the studio moguls, helping promote

the latest studio project. The rise - and fall - of Sid Grauman parallels the history of the

motion picture industry in the United States, from its wild free-for-all beginnings to the

standardized contrl by the Hollywood corporate giants.

DOUGLAS GOMERY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gomery, Douglas ( 1992), Shared Pleasures.

Sid Grauman and Gloria Swanson (in foreground) attending the Hollywood premiere of Léonce Perret's Madame Sans-

Gêne at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in 1925

Erich von Stroheim (1885-1957)

The actor and director known as 'Von' to his friends was born Erich Oswald Stroheim on

22 September 1885 in Vienna, to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1909 he emigranted to

the United States, giving his name on arrival as Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von

Stroheim. By the time he directed his first film Blind Husbands in 1919 he had converted

to Catholicism and woven various legends about himself, eagerly seized on and

elaborated by the Hollywood publicity machine. In these legends he was always an

aristocrat, generally Austrian, with a distinguished record in the imperial army, but he also

passed himself off as German, and an expert on German student life. His actual military

record in Austria seems to have been undistinguished, and it is not known if he had evern

been to university, let alone in Germany.

The 'German' version seems to have been merely, though bravely, opportunist, helping

him to an acting career as an evil Prussian officer in films made during the anti-German

fever of 1916-18, and contributing to his screen image as 'the man you love to hate'. But

the Austrian identity struck deeper. He became immersed in his own legend, and

increasingly assumed the values of the world he had left behind in Europe, a world of

decadence but also (in both senses of the word) nobility.

Erich von Stroheim (as 'Eric von Steuben') turns his amorous attentions to Francellia Billington ('the wife') in Blind

Husbands ( 1919)

As an actor he had tremendous presence. He was small (5' 5") but looked larger. His gaze

was lastful and his movements were angular and ungainly, with a repressed energy which

could break out into acts of chilling brutality. Both his charm and his villainy had an air of

calculation-unlike, say, Conrad Veidt, in whom both qualities seemed unaffectedly

natural.

His career as a director was marked by excess. Almost all his films came in over-long and

over budget, and had to be salvaged (and in the course of it often ruined) by the studio.

He had fierce battles with Irving Thalberg, first at Universal and then at MGM, which

ended in the studio asserting control over the editing. To get the effects he wanted he put

crew and cast through nightmares, shooting the climactic scenes in Greed on location in

Death Valley in midsummer 1923, in temperatures of over 120° F. Some of this excess

has been justified (first of all by Stroheim himself) in the name of realism, but it is better

seen as an attempt to give a extra layer of conviction to the spectacle, which was also

marked by strongly unrealistic elements. Stroheim's style is above all effective, but the

effect is one of a powerful fantasy, drawing the spectator irresistibly into a fictional world

in which the natural is indistinguishable from the grotesque. The true excess is in the

passions of the characters - overdrawn creations acting out a mysterious and often tragic

destiny.

On the other hand, as Richard Koszarski ( 1983) has emphasized, Stroheim was much

influenced by the naturalism of Zola and his contemporaries and followers. But this too is

expressed less in the representational technique than in the underlying sense of character

and destiny. Str oheim's characters, like Zola's, are what they are through heredity and

circumstance, and the drama merely enacts what their consequent destiny has to be.

Belief in such a theory is, of course, deeply ironic in Stroheim's case, since his own life

was lived in defiance of it. Unlike his characters, he was what he had become, not what

fate had supposedly carved him out to be.What he had become, by 1925 if not earlier, was

the unhappy exile, for ever banished from the turn-of-thecentury Vienna which was his

imaginary home. A contrast between Europe and America is a constant theme in his work,

generally to the disadvantage of the latter. Even those of his films set in America, such as

Greed ( 1924) or Walking down Broadway ( 1933) can be construed as barely veiled

attacks on America's myth of its own innocence. Most of his other films are set in Europe

(an exception is the monumental Queen Kelly, set mostly in Africa). Europe, and

particularly Vienna, is a site of corruption, but also of self-knowledge. Goodness rarely

triumphs in Stroheim's films, and love triumphs only with the greatest difficulty.

Nostalgia in Stroheim is never sweet and he was as savage with Viennese myths of

innocence as with American. His screen adaptation of The Merry Widow ( 1925) turned

Lehar's operetta into a spectacle in which decadence, cruelty, and more than a hint of

sexual perversion could the fantasy Ruritanian air. The Merry Widow was a commercial

success. Most of his other films were not. Stroheim's directing career did not survive the

coming of the synchronized dialogue films, and he had increasing difficulty finding roles

as an actor in the changed Hollywood climate. In his later years he moved uneasily

between Europe and America in search of work and home. In the last, unhappy decades of

his life he created two great acting roles, as the camp commandant Rauffenstein in

Renoir's La Grande Illusion ('The great illusion', 1937), and as Gloria Swanson's butler in

Wilder's Sunset Boulevard ( 1950). It is for his acting that he is now best remembered. Of

the films he directed, some have been lost entirely, while others have survived only in

mangled versions. This tragedy (which was partly of his own making) means that his

greatness as a filmmaker remains the stuff of legend - not unlike the man himself.

GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH SELECT FILMOGRAPHY As director Blind

Husbands ( 1919); The Devil's Pass Key ( 1920); Foolish Wives ( 1922); Merry-Go-

Round ( 1923); Greed ( 1924); The Merry Widow ( 1925); Wedding March ( 1928);

Queen Kelly ( 1929); Walking down Broadway ( 1933)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Curtiss, Thomas Quinn ( 1971), Von Stroheim.

Finler, Joel ( 1968), Stroheim.

Koszarski, Richard ( 1983), The Man You Loved to Hate; Erich von Stroheim and

Hollywood.

Mary Pickford (1893-1979)

Born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto, Canada, in 1893, Pickford and her two siblings

went on the stage at an early age to support their widowed mother. As Mary Pickford,

Gladys made her New York stage début in 1907. Two years later she was hired by the

American Mutoscope and Biograph Company to play a bit part in a D. W. Griffith one-

reeler, Her First Biscuits ( 1909). Her screen presence and well-developed acting talent

ensured her a central place in Griffith's troupe, and under his direction she appeared in

virtually a film a week during 1909 and 1910. Biograph did not credit their actors by

name, for fear that they would become too powerful. However, Pickford became famous

as an innocent and engaging heroine; the 'Biograph Girl with the Curls'.

In late 1910 she left Biograph in search of greater control and a larger salary. After

periods at various companies she settled at Adolph Zukor's Famous Players in 1913. She

was touted in publicity as ' America's Foremost Film Actress'. Her professional stamina

was legendary; she made seven features in 1914, eight in 1915. These films, particularly

Tess of the Storm Country ( Porter, 1914), cemented her screen image and the public's

affection for her, and elevated her to the position of first female screen superstar.

Mary Pickford in Little Annie Rooney ( 1925)

Her Botticelli-esque blonde beauty sent American critics into barely suppressed erotic

rapture. Yet her aura of dainty Victorian delicacy, so often emphasized in still

photographs, was complicated on screen by a quality of independent asexuality. She was

expert at playing the adolescent on the verge of womanhood, the goodnatured tomboy

posing as street tough, and the neglected working-class daughter. The success of these

portrayals depended upon her extraordinary ability to capture natural details of everyday

behaviour and to project an engaging, mischievous energy.

' America's Sweetheart' sold war bonds, gently preached the virtues of female equality,

and scrupulously hid her grown-up failings, including several adulterous affairs. Nothing

could touch her popularity, not even a divorce from her first husband to marry actor

Douglas Fairbanks in 1920. In fact, her marriage to Fairbanks was a publicist's dream

come true, and sealed the popularity of both stars. The couple became the royalty of

Hollywood, reigning from their plantial mansion Pickfair. Their fame was not limited to

America. In 1926 the couple received a rapturous welcome from crowds in Moscow.

Pickford had become 'The World's Sweetheart'.

Pickford's success had much to do with her skills as an astute businesswoman, who

carefully controlled her own image. At her peak, she assembled production teams, chose

her co-stars, wrote scenarios, occasionally directed herself (without credit), or hired

directors who would do what she told them.

In 1917 she began to produce her own Artcraft Pictures for Paramount/Famous

Players-Lasky. She made enormous amounts of money for the studio with films like Poor

Little Rich Girl ( Tourneur, 1917) and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm ( 1917) until she

reputedly told Zukor she could no longer 'afford to work for $10,000 a weak'. The

unprecedented control she had over her career culminated in 1919 with the founding of

United Artists with Fairbanks, Chaplin, and Griffith. This allowed her to oversee the

production and the distribution of her films.However, Pickford did not use her

extraordinary professional freedom to increase the diversity of her roles until it was too

late. UA films like Pollyanna ( 1920) and Little Lord Fauntleroy ( 1921) continued to

portray her as the sweet adolescent. This conservatism was broken only once, in a daring

(for her) collaboration with director Ernst Lubitsch, the costume drama Rosita ( 1923).

The film was a critical and financial success, but Pickford could not break with her

established image and, although now over 30, reverted back to sentimental adolescent girl

roles in Little Annie Rooney ( 1925) and Sparrows ( 1926). The silent film audience never

seemed to tire of this image.However, under the pressure of talkies and changing cultural

mores, she made a decisive transition to adult roles in her first sound film Coquette

( 1929); the film brought her profits and an Oscar, but Pickford's screen persona seemed

increasingly out of step with the modern sexual ideals promulgated by the Jazz Age. She

was, as Alistair Cooke has suggested, the woman every man wanted - for a sister.Pickford

retired from the screen in 1933 after he fourth talkie. The success of Coquette was never

repeated, and her career did not recover from The Taming of the Shrew ( 1929), a

disastrously unpopular talkie in which she had starred with Fairbanks; their first and last

film together. She retreated to the legendary Pickfair and, it is said, to be dubious

consolations of the bottle.Fearful of public ridicule of her adolescent screen persona she

bought the rights to her silent films with the apparent intention of having them destroyed

on her death. Although she later relented, her films are still difficult to see, and this has

contributed to the fixing of her image as the eternal innocent girl.

GAYLYN STUDLAR SELECT FILMOGRAPHY The Lonely Villa ( 1909); The New

York Hat ( 1913); Tess of the Storm Country ( 1914/1922); The Poor Little Rich Girl

( 1917); Stella Maris ( 1918); Daddy Long Legs ( 1919); Little Lord Fauntleroy ( 1921);

Rosita ( 1923); Little Annie Rooney ( 1925); My Best Girl ( 1927); Coquette ( 1929); The

Taming of the Shrew ( 1929); Secrets ( 1933)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eyman, Scott ( 1990), Mary Pickford: From Here to Hollywood.

Pickford, Mary ( 1955), Sunshine and Shadow.

Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939)

In the autumn of 1915 a Broadway actor named Douglas Fairbanks made his first

appearance on the screen. Although Triangle Pictures' expectations for him were modest,

Fairbanks's début film, The Lamb ( 1915), was a smash hit. Audiences loved him in the

role of Gerald, a 'mollycoddle' whose genteel, old-money ways were corrected by tapping

his pioneer heritage through proper Western adventure. Soon Fairbanks was starring in

one 'athletic comedy' a month. The standard formula for these was established on his third

film, His Picture in the Papers ( 1916), a clever urban satire penned by scenarist Anita

Loos and directed by John Emerson. These films earned him the nicknames of 'Dr Smile',

'Douggie', and 'Mr Pep'. He was Hollywood's primary cinematic exponent of optimism

and a bouncing, exuberant masculinity that made the world a playground to be scaled,

leapt over, and swung through.It was clear to critics and audiences that Fairbanks was

bringing the same character into every film, but it left few complaining: he was virtually

unrivalled in popularity. During the late 1910s, Fairbanks gained increasing control over

his productions. He moved from Triangle to Artcraft, a prestigious, artist-controlled

division of Paramount. There, he continued his collaboration with Loos and Emerson with

more clever satires of modern American life. Quack psychology, food faddism, the peace

movement, even Rooseveltian nostalgic primitivism, all became fodder for good-

humoured kidding. In one of his most successful pictures of this period. Wild and Woolly

( 1917), Fairbanks plays a childish New York railway heir who is sent out West to

supervise a paternal project. To gain the railway's business, Bitter Creek accommodates

him by turning their modern-day community into an 1880s boom town complete with

Wild West shoot-outs (with blanks) and a 'prairie flower' of a girl.Like his hero Theodore

Roosevelt, Fairbanks became a cultural icon of the 'strenuous life' so touted in American

discourse as the antidote to 'over-civilization', to urban life, and to feminine influence.

Fairbanks, however, drained this masculine ideal of its bellicose quality and substituted a

boyish charm. Audiences found him the perfect balance between Victorian gentility and

modern vitality.In 1919, Fairbanks joined other top box-office draws Charles Chaplin,

wife-to-be Mary Pickford, and director D. W. Griffith in the formation of United Artists.

There he had greater control of his films, and they began to change. He turned from

contemporary comedies to costume dramas like The Mark of Zorro ( 1920), an epic that

played off Fairbanks' penchant for transmutation between masculinities, here between the

effete Spaniard Don Cesar Vega and Zorro, the vigorous masked hereo. Fairbanks

repeatedly turned to stories drawn from literature either written for boys or popular with

them, like Dumas's The Three Musketeers ( 1921) with its youthful romantic hero

D'Artagnan.Fairbanks's artistic independence at UA led to more technically and

aesthetically ambitious films: Robin Hood ( 1922), The Thief of Bagdad ( 1924), and The

Black Pirate ( 1926), which are the epitome of the humorous adventure epic. By the end

of the silent period, however, Fairbanks's exuberance was beginning to wane as he

entered his late forties, and he decisively ended his silent film career with an elegantly

produced swan-song to boyish fantasy, The Iron Mask ( 1929), a film that ends, notably,

with D'Artagnan's death.Like Mary Pickford, Fairbanks had a youthful image that was

linked in the public imagination with the heyday of the silent cinema. Neither of these

great silent stars managed to re-establish their careers after the coming of sound.

Fairbanks starred in a number of unsuccessful talkies before his premature death in 1939.

Douglas Fiarbanks in Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad ( 1924)

GAYLYN STUDLAR SELECT FILMOGRAPHY The Lamb ( 1915); His Picture in the

Papers ( 1916); Wild and Woolly ( 1917); The Mollycoddle ( 1920); The Mark of Zorro

( 1920); The Three Musketeers ( 1921); Robin Hood ( 1922); The Thief of Bagdad

( 1924); Don Q, Son of Zorro ( 1925); The Black Pirate ( 1926); The Iron Mask( 1929);

The Private Life of Don Juan ( 1934)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cooke, Alistair ( 1940), Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character.

Schickel, Richard, and Fairbanks, Douglas Jr. ( 1975), The Fairbanks Album.

The First World War and the Crisis in Europe

WILLIAM URICCHIO

The summer of 1914 witnessed the opening of the Panama Canal, the start of production

on D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of

Austria. Each of these events, in its own way, would tangibly influence the course of film

history. The canal would stimulate the development of the US shipping industry,

providing the film industry with an infrastructure for greater international distribution.

Griffith's film would contribute to the transformation of film production practices and

distribution techniques, all of which helped the US industry to triumph over its European

competitors. And the Archduke's fate triggered the Great War, realigning the global

political economy and helping to destroy the once internationally prominent film

industries of France, England, and Italy.

The contours of international political, economic, and cultural power emerged from the

war fundamentally transformed. Changes of a magnitude almost unthinkable before the

war appeared on the political front in the form of a republic in Germany, a revolutionary

government in Russia, and women voters in the USA and Britain. The USA grew from a

pre-war parochial and introspective giant, lacking the vision and shipping resources for

world trade, into an assertively international dynamo, armed with ample product and the

means to deliver it. The balance of international political power, banking, trade, and

finance had decisively turned in the USA's favour. The cultural upheaval created by the

war was equally profound. Simply put, the war hurled Europe into the twentieth century.

Social hierarchies, epistemological and ethical systems, and representational conventions

all changed radically between 1914 and 1918. The very concepts of time, space, and

experience, recast by the writings of Einstein and Freud, found something close to

mainstream tolerance in the form of Cubism, Dada, and Expressionism. But just as

significantly, the old, élite cultures of Europe gave way in many sectors to the new mass

culture dominated by the United States.

The motion picture industry came out of the war as both emblem and instrument of the

cultural and economic realignment that would characterize the remainder of the century.

In broad terms, the pre- 1914 domination of international production and distribution by

the French, Italians, and English gave way by 1918 to the expansionist interests of the US

studios and a very different vision of the cinema. The war not only disrupted the trade

patterns so crucial to the traditional European powers, it also exacted a heavy price in

terms of the lives, material, and ongoing experimentation so vital to film production. And,

in very different ways, it assisted in the successful transformation of the US, German, and

ultimately Russian industries.

Despite the best attempts of the Motion Picture Patents Company ( MPPC -- popularly

known as 'the Trust') to limit competition within the USA in the pre-war era by licensing

domestic producers and restricting imports, the US market proved extremely attractive to

leading European producers whose industries were predicated upon international

distribution. Pathé-Frères, for example, had penetrated the market long before its

membership in the MPPC, and by 1911 opened its own US production studios and led

fellow Trust members in profits, while UrbanEclipse, Gaumont, and later Cines product

appeared on American screens thanks to MPPC member George Kleine. Many of the

other large European producers, however, offered their films to the quickly growing

independent movement. Constant litigation and shifting organizational alliances

encouraged companies such as Denmark's Nordisk Kompagni ( Great Northern Film

Company) and Italy's Ambrosio ( Ambrosio America Co.) to open their own US offices,

and sometimes, as in the case of Éclair, even laboratories and studios. The pre-war assault

upon the American market was not unique; nations such as Germany, Austria, Hungary,

Russia, and the Netherlands found themselves the targets of the same internationally

oriented production companies, without the organized resistance offered by America's

Trust. Reflecting larger trade patterns, French, Italian, and British films also dominated

the import markets of countries in South and Central America, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

Despite the prominence of Pathé-Frères in the USA, and of French product world-wide,

the situation would soon shift dramatically. A war-induced production slump, changes in

industry practice, direct government intervention into film affairs, and disrupted

international trade, all provided American producers with a market opening. The US

industry, however, largely insulated from the ravages of war by the nation's neutrality

until April 1917, was anything but peaceful. The years 1912 to 1915 saw the demise of

the MPPC, the fatal weakening of many of its members, and the simultaneous rise of an

oligopoly engineered by entrepreneurs such as Zukor, Fox, and Laemmle. By

standardizing production practices through strict divisions of labour and elaborate

organizational hierarchies, by seizing market advantage through such tactics as the

systematic exploitation of the star system, and by controlling film distribution and

exhibition through techniques such as direct theatrical competition and block booking, the

oligopoly transformed the character of the industry and its products.

The war would contribute to the growth of the studios by weakening foreign competition

both domestically and internationally, opening the way for post-war US domination. But

in many cases, the seeds of change could already be found in the immediate pre-war

years. In the summer of 1914, as Europe's leaders shuttled diplomatic briefs and its people

prepared to mobilize, America's MPPC neared the end of its long legal battles and

prepared to abandon its protectionist barriers. The US film market would never again be

so open to imports, but meanwhile old Trust members such as Eastman Kodak and

Vitagraph had themselves already launched an increasingly effective export counter-

offensive. For example Vitagraph, the leading American film exporter prior to the war,

opened its main European offices in Paris in 1906 and by 1908 had built a complete film

laboratory there from which it sent prints to its distribution offices in Italy, England, and

Germany. French domination of the international industry in the pre-war period

notwithstanding, American films competed for space on Paris screens before 1914. As

Richard Abel ( 1984) points out, increasing competition from American and Italian

producers, together with a series of legal and financial pressures, weakened France's grip

on some of its traditional markets.

Shortly before the declaration of war, as the French economy braced for an intense but

short conflict, its film industry ground to a temporary halt. General mobilization would

empty the studios of their personnel, the idle spaces instead finding use as temporary

barracks, and Pathé's film stock factory at Vincennes would be converted to the

production of war materials. Despite these adverse conditions, within a few months of the

war's declaration production quickly resumed in France, although not at pre-war levels,

with Pathé (shooting in the USA) and Gaumont, for example, creating extremely

successful serials such as Les Mystères de New York ('The Mysteries of New York', Pathé

1915-16) and Feuillade's Les Vampires ('The Vampires', 1915-16). But as the war dragged

on and Charles Pathé sought to supply his far-flung empire with films, his company

increasingly took on the character of a distribution agency for other companies despite its

continued support of independent productions. In so restructuring, Pathé led the French

industry to the same fate as the British, emphasizing distribution at the expense of

regularized production.

The cultural presence of the United States in French life increased thanks in part to

Pathé's reliance on its American studios for film production. But more directly, American

products in the form of Chaplin and Lloyd comedies and William S. Hart Westerns not

only filled the gaps left by domestic producers, they generated a positive enthusiasm

among French audiences and served as signs of the erosion of pre-war cultural value

systems. The remarkable popularity of the action-adventure female protagonist in many of

the wartime French serials, and the eager acceptance of America's 'new' culture

(displacing audiences' recent infatuation with Italian classical spectacles), points to the

transformation of popular taste which would reinforce America's market advantage in the

post-war era.

The British film industry, in contrast to the French, experienced a steady production

decline well before the war, but, as Kristin Thompson points out in her analysis of trade

patterns ( 1985), England enjoyed a strong distribution and re-export business. With its

large domestic exhibition market, the world's most developed shipping and sales network,

a system of dependent colonial and commonwealth trading partners, and until 1915

tarifffree imports, Britain served as the heart of pre-war international export. On the eve

of the war, however, although England had traditionally provided the USA's largest export

market (with Germany a distant second), elaborate French and Italian productions

successfully competed for an increased share of the business. This momentary deviation

would more than be rectified as the USA went on to command the allegiance of wartime

British viewers as never before.

The events of the summer of 1914 and growth of the US studio system would profoundly

alter the character of the British industry. The disruption of Continental markets (the loss

of Germany to British trade, for example), difficulties in shipping generated by insurance

requirements and reallocation of cargo space to war-essential materials, and an import

duty on films, all proved disastrous to an industry predicated upon distribution and re-

export. Film seemed a particularly troublesome commodity since the raw material of film

stock, cellulose nitrate, was both highly flammable (a potential threat to war-essential

shipping) and capable of being used in the manufacture of explosives (and, given

Germany's total reliance on imported nitrates, of natural interest to Britain's enemy). But

the rise of the USA's aggressively entrepreneurial studio system compounded Britain's

problems. Prior to the war, with the exception of Vitagraph, American Trust members had

been content to carry on the vast majority of their trade with England, which in turn re-

exported US films to Continental and world-wide markets. hompson credits the examples

set by the international marketing of The Birth of a Nation( 1915) and Civilization

( 1916), both of which required country-by-country negotiations, with a wider change in

US industry practice. By 1916, companies such as Fox, Universal, and Famous Players-

Lasky opened their own offices or negotiated through their own agents in locations

around the world. Fortunately for the studios, the boom in the US shipping industry

triggered in part by the Panama Canal (evident in increased shipbuilding and the

development of a world-wide network of US banks) greatly facilitated their expansionist

policies.

Italy, the site of Europe's other major film industry, eventually suffered much the same

fate as its French and British allies. The Italian government entered the conflict some nine

months after the principals and was initially spared the disruption facing its neighbours.

In the years leading up to the war, the Italian industry experienced growing momentum

thanks in part to its spectacle films. With casts numbering in the thousands and lavish,

often authentic, sets, films such as Quo vadis? ( 1913), The Last Days of Pompeii ( 1913),

and Cabiria ( 1914) captured the attention of viewers around the world, often at the

expense of American competition. The depressed economic conditions which permitted

such labour-intensive productions, however, also required the Italian studios to generate

export sales in order to survive. In the context of France's dropping production levels and

Britain's growing neglect of many former markets, Italy's delay in entering the war both

stimulated its already prominent market position and at least through 1916 provided the

exports it so badly needed. From that point on, however, Italy faced the same array of

obstacles as most of the belligerent nations: inadequate supplies of film stock, military

priorities in shipping, and redeployment of the work-force, to which Italy could add a

slowly collapsing economy.

Not surprisingly, the war stifled the emerging film industries of German-occupied nations

such as Belgium and belligerent powers such as Austria-Hungary. Their screens reflected

the proximity of military action and the consequent disruption of distribution patterns,

both of which resulted in a growing percentage of German films. By contrast, nations

which sought to remain above the fray, such as the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden,

used their neutrality to take advantage of the war-created reconfiguration of distribution,

and, through 1916 at least, to increase production levels. Despite the modest levels of

success they achieved, all three industries felt the constraints of shrinking markets,

reduced availability of stock, and shipping difficulties. In the Netherlands, opportunistic

distribution practices stimulated the film industry generally and production in companies

such as Hollandia-Film reached new levels. In Sweden's case, Charles Magnusson

carefully developed a production infrastructure which would be sustained in the post-war

period, while encouraging the work of directors such as Victor Sjöström and Mauritz

Stiller. Denmark, a self-sufficient film market and home to the internationally active

Nordisk Kompagni, enjoyed initial success, but fell victim to a series of pre-war industrial

difficulties (from everexpanding budgets to stylistic rigidity). More dramatically,

however, a 1917 German buy-out of Nordisk's substantial holdings in Germany, and with

them rights to Nordisk's films in much of Europe, effectively neutralized Denmark as an

international producer.

In sharp contrast to the film industries of Europe's Allied and neutral nations, Germany's

industry consolidated its domestic market and expanded its influence rapidly in both

occupied and neutral lands. As Germany had shown with its deployment of gas and

submarines, where sensitivity to the potentials of modern warfare joined with a vigorous

plan of action, a fresh vision together with centralized authority could lead to tremendous

advances. Thanks to the efforts of several leading industrialists and General Erich

Ludendorff, the nation was able to move from a pre-war reliance on imported French,

Danish, and American films, to control of its own screens by the war's end.

The rapid changes in the German market resulted from two major factors. First, the

declaration of war interrupted the flow of imports from England, France, and eventually

Italy, forcing Germany to rely increasingly upon trade with neutrals such as Denmark and

the USA. This experience underscored the problems of trade dependencies. Secondly, as

early as 1914 industrialists such as Krupp's Alfred Hugenberg realized the positive

advantages to be gained by film as a medium of political influence. Hugenberg, later to

control Universum-Film AG (Ufa), formed the Deutsche Lichtbild Gesellschaft,

effectively provoking competing representatives from the electrical and chemical

industries to forge an alliance with the government. In a grand plan secretly orchestrated

by General Ludendorff and partially financed by the government, existing companies

such as Messter, Union, and Nordisk were purchased and reorganized in 1917 into Ufa,

which overnight became Germany's most important producer, distributor, and exhibitor of

films. Government and industrial capital, the new markets provided by territorial conquest

and Nordisk's rights, and an acute awareness of film's propaganda potential, all in a

virtually competition-free environment, led to continued theatre construction and

increased film production until the end of the war.

The experience of the Russian film industry until the government's collapse in 1917

appeared somewhat closer to the German than the Allied model. With a pre-war

dependence on imports for up to 90 per cent of its films, war-related transportation

problems, and declining production levels among its French, British, and Italian trading

partners, the Russian industry had to fend for itself. Toeplitz ( 1987) claims that by 1916,

despite difficult economic conditions, domestic production levels reached some 500 films.

Under these circumstances, the Russian market, characterized by among other things its

demands for films with tragic endings and a high degree of formal stasis, helped to

develop a distinctly national cinema as evident in the work of Yevgeny Bauer and Yakov

Protazanov. From late 1917 onwards, however, the Bolshevik revolution and the civil war

which followed it, together with extreme privation in many parts of the nation,

temporarily halted the progress of the film industry.

The war, regardless of its impact on the various national cinemas, encouraged a series of

common developments. Film played an explicit role in shaping public sentiments towards

the conflict and in informing the public of the war's progress. From Chaplin's The Bond

( 1918) or Griffith's Hearts of the World ( 1918) to The Universal Animated Weekly or

Annales de guerre, film served the interests of the State, and in so doing demonstrated its

'good citizenship'. Such demonstrations of civic responsibility helped to placate the film

industry's lingering enemies from the pre-war era -- concerned clergy, teachers, and

citizens who perceived motion pictures as a threat to established cultural values -- and to

reassure those progressive reformers who held high hopes for film as a medium with

uplifting potentials. National governments and the military, too, took an active role in the

production and often regulation of film. Germany's BUFA (Bild- und Film Amt), the

USA's Committee on Public Information, Britain's Imperial War Office, and France's

Service Photographique et Cinématographique de l'Armée variously controlled

photographic access to the front, produced military and medical training films, and

commissioned propaganda films for the public. And, legitimizing strategies aside, tent

cinemas on the front and warm theatres in European cities short of fuel drew new

audiences to the motion picture. In this regard, the unusually high levels of organization

and support provided by the German government to BUFA and Ufa were matched by its

efforts on the front, with over 900 temporary soldiers' cinemas.

A scene from Maudite soit la guerre ('A curse on war'), a pacifist drama made for Pathé's Belgian subsidiary by Alfred

Machin in 1913, and released just before the outbreak of the War in 1914

Europe's first major military conflict in the modern era obviously proved attractive as a

motion picture subject, as the rapid development of atrocity and war films in each of the

combatant nations suggests. These films often cut across existing forms, as Chaplin's

Shoulder Arms ( 1918), Winsor McKay's animated The Sinking of the Lusitania ( 1918),

and Gance's J'accuse (I Accuse, 1919) attest. And the interest both in the new war genre

and in explorations of the horrors and heroism of the First World War continued well

beyond it, from Vidor's The Big Parade ( 1925) and Walsh's What Price Glory ( 1926), to

Kubrick's Paths of Glory ( 1957). Beyond permeating the period's realist films, often in as

muted a form as character reference, it would echo particularly loudly during the

economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when reappraisal of the war could

serve the causes of pacifism ( Milestone's 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front and

Renoir's 1937 La Grande Illusion) or militarism ( Ucicky's 1933 Morgenrot ('Dawn')).

The war, then, served not only to dismantle Europe's dominant pre-war industries, but,

ironically, to construct a tacit consensus regarding the national importance of cinema. The

latter point underwent a curious permutation which assisted the US penetration of markets

such as England, France, and Italy, and meanwhile stimulated the distinctive national

identities of the German and Russian cinemas. As the specifically 'national' character of

the European allies' cinema became increasingly associated with the gruelling war effort

and pre-war national identities, the US cinema increasingly appeared as a morale booster

and harbinger of a new internationalism. Chaplin's appeal to French children, workers,

and intellectuals alike outlined the trajectory which American feature films would follow

by the war's end, as US films served the cultural functions of social unification and

entertainment while expressing the emphatically modern Zeitgeist of the post-war era.

The German experience differed considerably. The perceived cultural distinctions which

in part provoked the war and which lurked behind the government's active support of Ufa

would continue to drive the film industry in the post-war era. Although US film

penetration of the German market increased until late in 1916, the taste for American

product acquired by the French, British, and Italians failed to take hold. And the post-war

Aufbruch, or break with the past, also failed to resonate with the cultural values of the

USA, at least as manifest in its films. The late date of US resumption of trade with

Germany, and the extremity of German inflation (which led to an exchange rate of over 4

trillion marks to the dollar in 1923) effectively precluded US interest in the film market

and prolonged Germany's isolation. National cultural needs would be met by national film

production. The Russian situation, although quite different and compounded by a

lingering civil war and economic boycott, shared the same basic dynamic as a

revolutionary culture set out to produce its own revolutionary films.

Europe emerged from the war ridden by debt (mostly to the USA) and physically

traumatized. France, Italy, and Germany faced the additional ordeals of social unrest,

political turmoil, severe inflation, and an influenza epidemic which swept across Europe

killing more people than the war itself. With the exception of Germany, where the film

industry enjoyed relative stability, Europe's motion picture business emerged from the war

in a state of shock. For example, its sometimes successful attempts to produce films

notwithstanding, the French industry turned increasingly to distribution, while Italy

attempted to return to the glories of the spectacle film, but found that international taste

had changed considerably. As the leaders of the pre-war industry attempted to shake off

several years of relative inactivity and re-enter the world of production and international

distribution, they found conditions very much changed by the American studios. The

linkage of big-budget features, new studio technologies and production practices,

expensive stars, and the consequent need to assure investors of large international markets

was difficult to break, especially in the face of ravaged domestic economies and a still

splintered and impoverished Europe. America, by contrast, came out of the war with a

massive and relatively healthy domestic market, and an aggressive and well-oiled studio

system. Moderately sensitive to the needs of the foreign market, and armed with an

international infrastructure of shipping, banking, and film offices, the US industry was in

a position to enjoy the post-war shift in the balance of power. Although the weakened film

industries of several European nations attempted to have protective tariffs erected, such

efforts initially had little effect since the American studios could simply exploit the

advantages of the USA's diplomatic and financial power and block legislation.

But the triumph of American films in the post-war period also reflects the changed

position of cinema within the cultural hierarchy, and, in turn, the broader fabric of cultural

transformations which helped give rise to and took form through the war. The often brutal

disruption of lives, families, work, and values served to shatter lingering nineteenth-

century sensibilities. The differences between Sennett's conception of comedy and Harold

Lloyd's, or between Mary Pickford's embodiment of feminine identity and Theda Bara's,

or between the value systems of The Birth of a Nation ( 1915) and DeMille's Male and

Female ( 1919), suggest the dimensions of the change that had occurred within sectors of

the American public.

An emphatic break with (and often critique of) the past and a self-conscious embrace of

the modern characterized the post-war scene. But the 'modern' itself was a vexed category.

Post-war Europe quickly defined the modern within an older, élitist, and highly

intellectualized aesthetic sensibility, as the institutional histories of the various '-isms' in

painting, music, and avant-garde film suggest. But the modern as manifest in American

mass culture, and nowhere more apparent than in the Hollywood feature, embodied

democratic appeal, instant gratification, and seamless illusionism. The promise of a

readymade, one-size-fits-all culture reinforced the economic inroads made by the US film

industry in Europe, evident in the rise to western dominance of what has been dubbed the

classical Hollywood cinema. In contrast to a European modernism predicated upon the

self-conscious use of image and cutting patterns, Hollywood's modernism inhered in the

industrialized creation of products driven by the project of telling stories as efficiently and

transparently as possible, deploying such techniques as 'invisible editing' to that end.

Although these divergent senses of the modern would fuel endless cultural debates, the

post-war dominance experienced by the US film industry and the persistence throughout

the west of the signifying practices associated with Hollywood would characterize the

decades to come.

Bibliography

Abel, Richard ( 1984), French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929.

Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), The Classical Hollywood

Cinema.

Cherchi Usai, Paolo, and Codelli, Lorenzo ( 1990). Before Caligari.

Koszarski, Richard ( 1990), An Evening's Entertainment.

Monaco, Paul ( 1976), Cinema and Society.

Reeves, Nicholas ( 1986), Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War.

Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), Exporting Entertainment.

Frank Borzage (1894-1962)

The son of an Italian stone mason, Frank Borzage was born in Salt Lake City. One of

fourteen children, he left home at fourteen to join a travelling theatrical troupe and soon

became a member of Gilmour Brown's stock company, playing character parts in mining

camps throughout the West. In 1912 Borzage went to Los Angeles, where producer-

director Thomas Ince hired him as an extra, then leading man in two and three-reel

Westerns. In 1916, he began directing films in which he starred; two years later, he gave

up acting for directing.

Borzage's early films as actor/director explore characters and situations that recur in his

later work. As Hal, the dissolute son of a millionaire in Nugget Jim's Partner ( 1916), a

drunk Borzage argues with his father and hops a frieght car which bears him to a western

mining town. Here he encounters Nugget Jim, rescues Jim's daughter from her dreary life

as a dance hall girl, and creates with them an idylic world of their own. Slightly-built and

curly-headed, Borzage conveys the innocence, energy, and optimism that became the

trademark of Charles Farrell's performances for the director in 7th Heaven ( 1927), Street

Angel ( 1928), Lucky Star ( 1929) and The River ( 1929).

Charles Farrell ('I'm a very remarkable fellow') with Janet Gaynor in a scene from Seventh Heaven ( 1927)

Borzage's origins inform a number of his films set in lower and working class milieux.

His first major success was an adaptation of Fannie Hurst's Humoresque ( 1920), which

describes the rise to fame of a young violinist from the teeming Jewish ghetto on New

York's lower east side and his efforts, as wounded war veteran, to recover his ability to

play again. The love story of Seventh Heaven which earned Borzage the first Academy

Award for Best Director and which Variety labelled the 'perfect picture,' involves the

rescue of a gamine of the Parisian streets by a sewer worker, Bad Girl ( 1931), another

Oscar winner, was a work of tenement realism, favourably compared to Vidor's Street

Scene ( 1931) by contemporary critics, exploring the mundane routines of courtship,

marriage, pregnancy, and birth, and celebrating the triumphs and tragedies of an average

young couple.

Borzage specialized in narratives dealing with couples beset by social, economic, and/or

political forces which threaten to disrupt their romantic harmony. The hostile

environments of war and social and economic turmoil function both as an obstacle to his

lovers' happiness and the very condition of their love, against which they must affirm

their feelings for one another. In many of his films, the context of war obstructs the efforts

of young lovers to establish a space for themselves apart from that of the more cynical

and worldly characters around them.

Throughout his career, Borzage denounced war and violence; Liliom ( 1930) condemns

domestic abuse; a profound pacifism underlies A Farewell to Arms ( 1932), and No

Greater Glory ( 1934); and he emerged as one of Hollywood's first and most confirmed

anti-fascists, dramatizing the evils of totalitarian movements in post-war Germany in

Little Man, What Now? ( 1934), and openly attacking fascism well before American entry

into World War II in The Mortal Storm ( 1940).

Borzage's vision is genuinely Romantic in its emphasis upon the primacy and

authenticity of feeling. His lovers emerge as nineteenth-century holdovers in a

dehumanized and nihilistic modern world. The form which Borzage's romanticism most

often takes is a secularized religious allegory. In 7th Heaven, Street Angel, Man's Castle

( 1933), and Little Man, What Now?, his edenic lovers transfrom their immediate space

into a virtual heaven on earth. Chico, the hero in 7th Heaven, dies and is mysteriously

reborn; Angela, the heroine in Street Angel, becomes an angel, a transformation mirrored

in the hero's madonna-like portrait of her. Strange Cargo ( 1940), which was banned by

the Catholic church in several American cities, provides perhaps the most overt religious

allegory. In it, a group of escaped convicts and other outcasts follow a map, written inside

the cover of a Bible, through a tropical jungle. Their 'exodus' concludes with a hazardous

sea voyage in a small open boat and with the miraculous apotheosis of their Christ-like

guide. Borzage's purest lovers appear in Till We Meet Again ( 1944) in which the director

fashions an unstated, repressed romantic liaison between an American aviator shot down

behind enemy lines and the novice from a French convent who poses as his wife in order

to escort him to safety.According to Hervé Dumont ( 1993), Borzage's basic narrative

pattern in his romantic melodramas was that of Mozart's Magic Flute, and involved a

symbolic struggle resembling the rites of passage embodied in the initiation ceremonies

of Freemasonry. Borzage joined the Masion in 1919, eventually rising to the 32nd grade

('Master of the Royal Secret') in 1941. Like Mozart's Sarastro, Borzage oversees the

passage of young lovers through a series of trials and ordeals to achieve a state of spiritual

enlightenment and transformation. Borzage's repudiation of contemporary reality in

favour of an emotional and spiritual inner world proved to be out of step with post-war

American culture. After 1945 he made only four films, and his attempt to retell the great

love story of 7th Heaven to a new generation of filmgoers in China Doll ( 1958) failed to

find a receptive audience. Though various revivals of his films in the United States,

Britain, and France in the 1970s attempted to re-establish his status as a major force in

film melodrama, his work, unlike the more sophisticated and 'modern' cinema of Douglas

Sirk, has yet to achieve the critical recognition it deserves.

JOHN BELTON SELECT FILMOGRAPHY Humoresque ( 1920); Lazybones ( 1925);

7th Heaven ( 1927); Street Angel ( 1928); Lucky Star ( 1929); Bad Girl ( 1931); A

Farewell to Arms ( 1932); Man's Castle ( 1933); Little Man, What Now? ( 1934); History

Is Made at Night ( 1937); Three Comrades ( 1938); Strange Cargo ( 1940); The Mortal

Storm ( 1940); I've Always Loved You ( 1946); Moonrise ( 1948); China Doll ( 1958);

The Big Fisherman ( 1959)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Belton, John ( 1974), The Hollywood Professionals.

Dumont, Hervé ( 1993), Frank Borzage: Sarastro à Hollywood.

Lamster, Frederick ( 1981), Souls Made Great Through Love and Adversity.

William S. Hart (1865-1946)

Although born in New York, William Surrey Hart spent his childhood in the Midwest, at a

time when it still retained much of the feel of the frontier. A career on the stage offered

him only a meagre living until he landed the part of Cash Hawkins, a cowboy, in Edwin

Milton Royle 's hit play The Squaw Man in 1905. Parts in other Western dramas followed,

among them the lead in the stage version of Owen Wister's The Virginian in 1907.

Touring California in 1913, he decided to look up an old acquaintance, Thomas Ince, who

was busy developing the studio at Santa Ynez which would soon be known as Inceville.

Ince recognised Hart's potential and offered him work at $175 a week. For the next two

years Hart appeared in a score of two-reel Westerns and a couple of features, working

with the script-writer C. Gardner Sullivan. Typically, as in The Scourge of the Desert,

Hart is cast as a 'Good Badman', frequently an outlaw moved to reform by the love of a

pure woman. In 1915 Ince and Hart joined Triangle Films, and Hart, by now a hugely

successful Western star, graduated finally to feature-length pictures.One of his most

successful Triangle films was Hell's Hinges, released in 1916. Hart plays Blaze Tracy, a

gunman hired by the saloon owner to ensure that the newly arrived preacher does not ruin

his trade by civilizing the town. But Blaze is moved by the radiance of the preacher's

sister. When a mob sets light to the church, he arrives to rescue the girl, and then takes on

the whole town single-handed and burns it to the ground. Hart's tall, lean figure and his

angular, melancholy face projected a persona imbued with all the moral certainties of the

Victorian age which formed him. To villians and to other races, especially Mexicans, he is

implacably hostile. But he is courteous, even diffident, around women. Hart is a loner, his

only companion his horse Fritz.In 1917 Hart moved to Famous Players-Lasky when

Adolph Zukor offered him $150,000 a picture. Distribution of his films under

Paramount's Artcraft label ensured great success in the years immediately after the First

World War. Not all Hart's films were Westerns, but it was the Western to which he

returned time and again. Of Hart's later films still extant, Blue Blazes Rawden ( 1918),

Square Deal Sanderson ( 1919), and The Toll Gate ( 1920) are among the best. Production

budgets increased, and more time and trouble were taken. Those which Hart did not direct

himself were entrusted to the reliable Lambert Hillyer.But as the 1920s progressed, Hart's

films began to appear dated. The pace grew ponderous; Hart, never one for the lighter

touch, took himself more and more seriously, and his tendency towards sentimentality

grew more pronounced. Hart liked to think that his films presented a realistic picture of

the West, and Wild Bill Hickok ( 1923) was an attempt at a serious historical

reconstruction. But Paramount were unhappy with it. Hart was by now 57 years old, and

could no longer present a convincing action hero to the Jazz Age audience. His next

picture, Singer Jim McKee ( 1924), was a flop and his contract was terminated.His last

film, Tumbleweeds ( 1925), released through United Artists, had $100,000 of his own

money in it. It contained some spectacular land rush scenes, but it was another failure and

Hart was forced to retire. Tumbleweeds was reissued a decade later, with a sound-track on

which Hart delivered a spoken introduction: 'My friends, I loved the art of making motion

pictures. It is, as the breath of life to me . . . .' It is an extraordinary moment, fascinating

for the glimpse it offers of a Victorian stage actor in full, faintly ludicrous rhetorical

flight, yet undeniably moving in its evocation of the world of the silent Western which

Hart embodied.

W. S. Hart featured on the cover of Picture-Play magazine in 1917

EDWARD BUSCOMBE SELECT FILMOGRAPHY In the Sage Brush Country

( 1914); The Scourge of the Desert ( 1915); Hell's Hinges ( 1916); The Return of Draw

Egan ( 1916); The Narrow Trail ( 1917); Blue Blazes Rawden ( 1918); Selfish Yates

( 1918); Square Deal Sanderson ( 1919); The Toll Gate ( 1920); Wild Bill Hickok ( 1923);

Tumbleweeds ( 1925)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Koszarski, Diane Kaiser ( 1980), The Complete Films of William S. Hart: A Pictorial

Record.

Tom Mix (1880-1940)

The most popular Western star of the 1920s, Tom Mix was the epitome of a Jazz Age

movie hero. In place of the moral fervour of William S. Hart, a Tom Mix picture provided

non-stop entertainment, a high-speed melange of spectacular horse-riding, fist-fights,

comedy, and chases. Usually the stunts were performed by Mix himself. In his early

twenties he had worked as a wrangler at the famous Miller Brothers 101 Ranch, a Wild

West show based in Oklahoma. Mix was working with another show in 1909 when the

Selig Company used its facilities to make a film entitled Ranch Life in the Great

Southwest, in which he was featured briefly as a bronco-buster. Over the next seven years

Mix appeared in nearly a hundred Selig oneand two-reel Western, shot first in Colorado

and then in California.In 1917 the Fox sutdio promoted Mix to feature-length films, with

high-quality production values, much of the filming being done on location at spectacular

western sites such as the Grand Canyon. Mix's star persona was a fun-loving free spirit,

adept at rescuing damsels in distress. On screen Tom was clean-living, with no smoking

or drinking, and little actual gun-play. Villains were more likely to be captured by a clever

ruse than dispatched by a bullet. Mix made the occasional foray outside the Western for

example in Dick Turpin ( 1925), but it was the Western that made him, and he in turn

made the Fox sutdio the most successful Western producer of the age. Many of his sixty

or so features are no longer extant. Only a few sequences survive of North of Hudson

Bay, one of two Mix films under the direction of Fox's premier Western director at the

time, John Ford. Fortunately, several good examples of his work do remain. The Great K

& A Train Robbery ( 1926) gives a typical impression of Mix in his prime. It opens with a

spectacular stunt in which Tom slides down a cable to the bottom of a gorge, and ends,

after skirmishes on top of moving trains, with an epic first-fight in an underground cavern

between Tom and about a dozen villains. He captures them all.The Fox publicity machine

worked hard at constructing a biography which was as colourful as Mix's screen

performance. It was variously claimed that his mother was part-Cherokee, that he fought

with the army in Cuba during the Spanish - American War, taking part in the famous

charge up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, and also fought in the

Boxer Rebellion in Peking. None of these things was true. Mix did not leave the United

States during his brief army service, which ended ignominiously with his desertion when

he got married.By all accounts Mix often found it difficult to separate out fact from

faction. He followed the show-business tradition of Western heroes initiated by Buffalo

Bill Cody. Both on and off screen he became an increasingly flamboyant figure, with his

huge white hat, embroidered western suits, diamond-studded belts, and hand-tooled boots.

Though, unlike Hart, Mix had been a genuine working cowboy, his roots were in the Wild

West show and the rodeo, and at periodic points in his career he returned to touring in live

shows, including circuses. Mix's career was past its peak by the time sound came to the

Western, but the singing cowboys of the 1930s, with their fanciful costumes and Arcadian

vision of western ranch life, were his direct descendants, His last film, the serial The

Miracle Rider, was a rather sad affair. Five years later, short of money, he tried to

persuade Fox to finance a come-back. His old friend John Ford had to explain that the

picture business had passed him by. Later that year his car overturned at a bend outside

Florence, Arizona, killing him instantly.

Riders of the Purple Sage ( 1925)

EDWARD BUSCOMBE SELECT FILMOGRAPHY Ranch Life in Great Southwest

( 1909); The Heart of Texas Ryan ( 1917); The Wilderness Trail ( 1919); Sky High

( 1922); Just Tony ( 1922); Tom Mix in Arabia ( 1922); Three Jumps Ahead ( 1923); The

Lone Star Ranger ( 1923); North of Hudson Bay ( 1923); Riders of the Purple Sage

( 1925); The Great K & A Trian Robbery ( 1926); Rider of Death Valley ( 1932)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brownlow, Kevin ( 1979), The War, the West and the Wilderness.

Mix, Paul E. ( 1972), The Life and Legend of Tom Mix.

THE SILENT FILM

Tricks and Animation

DONALD CRAFTON

Contrary to popular belief, the history of animation did not begin with Walt Disney's

sound film Steamboat Willie in 1928. Before then there was a popular tradition, a film

industry, and a vast number of films -- including nearly 100 of Disney's -- which pre-

dated the so-called classic studio period of the 1930s.

The general history of the animated film begins with the use of transient trick effects in

films around the turn of the century. As distinct genres emerged (Westerns, chase films,

etc.) during 1906-10, there appeared at the same time films made all or mostly by the

animation technique. Since most movies were a single reel, there was little programmatic

difference between the animated films and others. But as the multi-reel film trend

progressed after around 1912, with only a handful of exceptions, animated films retained

their one-reel-or-less length. At the same time they began to be associated in the

collective mind of producers and audiences with comic strips, primarily because they

adapted already-existing heroes from the popular printed media and 'signed' the films in

the cartoonists' names, although the artists generally had no involvement in the

production. Until the First World War, animation was a thoroughly international

phenomenon, but after about 1915 the producers in the United States dominated the world

market. Although there were many attempts at indigenous European production, the

1920s remained the dominion of the American character series: Mutt and Jeff, Koko the

Clown, Farmer Al Falfa, and Felix the Cat. Of all the ways in which the formation of the

animated film paralleled feature production, the most notable was the cartoon's

assimilation of the 'star system' in the 1920s, during which animation studios created

recurring protagonists who were analogous to human stars.

DEFINITIONS

The animated film can be broadly defined as a kind of motion picture made by arranging

drawings or objects in a manner that, when photographed and projected sequentially on

movie film, produces the illusion of controlled motion. In practice, however, definitions

of what constitutes animation are inflected by a variety of technical, generic, thematic,

and industrial considerations.

Technique

Animated images were being made long before cinematography was invented in the

1890s; as David Robinson ( 1991) has shown, making drawings move was a prototype for

making photographs move and has a history that diverges from that of cinema. If we

restrict our discussion to theatrical animated films, then 1898 is a possible starting-point.

Although there is no acceptable evidence to verify either claim, the animation technique

might have been discovered independently by J. Stuart Blackton in the United States and

by Arthur Melbourne-Cooper in England. Each claimed to have been first to exploit an

alternative way of using the motion picture camera: manipulating objects in the field of

vision and exposing only one or a few frames at a time in order to mimic the illusion of

motion created by ordinary cinematography. In projection, it makes no difference whether

the individual frames have been exposed 16-24 times per second or exposed with an

indefinite interval; the illusion of motion is the same. So the traditional technologically

based definition of animation as constructing and shooting frame by frame is clearly

inadequate. All movies are composed, exposed, and projected frame by frame (otherwise

the image would be blurred). The defining technical factor seems to be in the intended

effect to be produced on the screen.

Genre

It was not until about 1906 that the animated film became a recognizable mode of

production. Humorous Phases of Funny Faces ( Blackton, 1906) depicted an artist's hand

sketching caricatures which then moved their eyes and mouths. This was done by

exposing a couple of frames, erasing the chalk drawing, redrawing it slightly modified,

then exposing more frames. The impression was created that the drawings were moving

by themselves. Émile Cohl 's Fantasmagorie ( 1908) also showed an artist's drawings

moving on their own, achieving independence from him. Gradually these conventions

were consolidated into characteristic themes and iconography which set this kind of film-

making apart from other novelty productions. Before about 1913, the items that were

animated tended to be objects -- toys, puppets, and cut-outs -- but slowly the proportion of

drawings to objects increased until, after 1915, 'animated cartoons', that is, drawings

(especially comic strips), were understood as constituting the genre.

Themes and conventions

Should animation be defined by characteristic themes? Some commentators have

identified 'creating the illusion of life' as animation's essential metaphor. Another

recurring motif is the representation of the animators (or their symbolic substitutes)

within the films. The confusion between the universe represented in the films and the

'real' world of the animator and the film audience is another persistent theme.

Animated films can also be defined culturally. It is often imagined that animation is a

humorous genre, aimed mainly at children, and indeed children have always been (and

continue to be) a large part of the audience for the cartoon film. But animation consists of

more than cartoons, and it should not be forgotten that even the classic cartoon was made

for general audiences, not a juvenile audience alone. A cultural definition of animation

would therefore need to take into account the kind of humour it represents but also its

association (particularly in the early period) with magic and the supernatural, and its

ability to function as a repository of psychological processes such as fantasy or infantile

regression.

Industry

Produced in specialized units (whether in studios or in artisanal workshops), animated

films soon came to have a particular place in the film programme. The cartoon was the

moment in the programme which foregrounded neither 'reality' (newsreel or

documentary) nor human drama (the feature), but humour, slapstick spectacle and

narrative, animal protagonists, and fantastic events, produced by drawings or puppets.

PRECURSORS

The 'trick film' was one of the earliest film genres. While identified primarily with the

work of the French magician turned film-maker Georges Méliès, many such films were

made in several countries between 1898 and 1908. During photography the camera would

be stopped, a change made (for example, a girl substituted for a skeleton), then

photography resumed.

A precursor of the animated film: a shot from Georges Méliès's 'trick film' The Man with the Rubber Head ( L'Homme à

la tête en caoutchouc, 1902)

Méliès himself apparently did not make extensive use of frame-by-frame animation. For

that one must turn to James Stuart Blackton, one of the founders of the Vitagraph

Company and maker of what is usually taken to be the first true animated cartoon,

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. In 1906-7, Blackton made half a dozen films which

employed animated effects. His most influential was The Haunted Hotel ( February

1907), which was a smash hit in Europe, primarily because of its close-up animation of

tableware. Among film-makers profoundly influenced by Blackton's Vitagraph work were

Segundo de Chomón of Spain (working in France), Melbourne-Cooper and Walter R.

Booth ( England), and, in the United States, Edwin S. Porter at Edison and Billy Bitzer at

Biograph.

In these trick films animation was basically-a trick. Like the sleight of hand in a magic

film, the animated footage in these short films was a way to thrill, amuse, and incite the

curiosity of the spectators. As the novelty wore off, some producers -- notably Blackton

himself -abandoned this kind of film. Others expanded and modified it, leading to the

creation of the new autonomous film genre.

ARTISANS: COHL AND MCCAY

Émile Cohl had been a caricaturist and comic strip artist before discovering cinema

around the age of 50. From 1908 to 1910 he worked on at least seventy-five films for the

Gaumont Company, contributing animated footage to most of them. A rather obsessive

artist, Cohl quickly devised numerous animation procedures which remain fundamental,

such as illuminated animation stands with vertically mounted electrically driven cameras,

and charts for calculating movement duration and lens depth of field. He placed various

media under the camera, including drawings, models, puppets, photographic cut-outs,

sand, stamps, and assorted objects. What Cohl's films did not exhibit was a traditional

linear plot; instead his background as a graphic artist became a source for ever-changing

scenes of fantastic drawings that metamorphosed into each other with irrational logic and

obscure symbolism. Bizarre though they seem today, Cohl's films were apparently

extremely popular. He worked for the Pathé and Éclair companies, the latter of which

assigned him to its American branch in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1912. He adapted a

cartoon series based on George McManus's comic strip 'The Newlyweds and their Baby'.

The success of these fourteen films inspired many other newspaper cartoonists to produce

or commission animated versions of their own works.

One interested graphic artist was Winsor McCay, unquestionably the most brilliant

newspaper cartoonist of the day. In 1911 he screened a short untitled film in which he

animated some characters from his 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' strip. The drawings were

meticulously retraced on cards, photographed by Vitagraph, and then the release print was

coloured by McCay frame by frame. In the live-action prologue McCay proudly displayed

the thousands of drawings and the flipping apparatus for testing the movements. In

addition to providing narrative integration for the animation, the prologue also vividly

showed how to draw and photograph animated cartoons to all who watched-and there

were many. In 1912 McCay made The Story of a Mosquito, in which static backgrounds

were used, retraced in each drawing. There were some ambitious experiments in moving

perspective. Gertie, presented on stage in 1914 and also released as a one-reel feature,

was the most accomplished animated film to date (and for many years thereafter). We see

McCay call Gertie the dinosaur out of hiding in her cave and put her through some circus-

like tricks. The film was rightly hailed as a masterpiece and contributed to the increasing

popularity of the genre. His The Sinking of the Lusitania: An Amazing Moving Pen

Picture was released in 1918. It depicted the wartime tragedy with a combination of

'objective' and 'cartoon' graphic styles. McCay conceived many film projects and

managed to finish several before his death in 1934.

INDUSTRIALIZATION: BRAY AND BARRÉ

From the popularity of 'The Newlyweds', McCay's extravaganzas, and the sporadic

releases by novice animators it was clear that audiences were delighting in these films.

The problem was that the craft was so labour-intensive that the rental return was

insufficient to offset production costs. Cohl and others had tried to use cut-outs to replace

some of the time-consuming drawing, but this compromised the graphic interest of the

films.

John Randolph Bray invented a way to alleviate much of the retracing which the older

methods required. A comic strip artist and fledgeling animator (having released one film

in 1913), Bray developed the use of transparent overlays made of sheets of cellulose

nitrate. It was through his encounter with another animator, Earl Hurd, who already held

patents on celluloid use, that he perfected what became called the cel system. This

involved separating the moving from the static elements in the picture. The background

and other non-moving parts were drawn on a paper sheet; moving figures were drawn in

their proper sequential poses on the transparent cels. These were laid over and

photographed individually to obtain the illusion of a figure moving across a stationary

background. This process remained standard in the animation industry until the advent of

xerography and computeraided design. Bray and Hurd aggressively protected their

proprietary claim to the process. Most animation studios from 1915 to the early 1930s

obtained licences from the Bray-Hurd patent company and paid royalties.

Bray was good at adapting techniques developed by others. This was also the case with a

competitor, Raoul BarrÉ, a talented comic strip artist from Montreal who, in collaboration

with William Nolan, began making cartoons for the Edison studio in 1915. BarrÉ, rather

than attempting to turn out films single-handedly, introduced the concept of a division of

labour, rather like a car assembly line with a hierarchy of jobs. Another valuable

contribution was the use of pegs on the drawing board which fitted precisely into punched

alignment holes on the tracing sheets. (McCay and Bray had used printer's cross-marks

for registering drawings.) BarrÉ and Nolan invented their own way of streamlining the

animation chore, but without using cels (and not patentable). The slash system, as it is

now called, also divided the composition into moving and static elements but,

ingeniously, the drawing was planned so that the background could be placed over the

foreground (the inverse of the cel system). Both elements were drawn on the same kind of

white paper. Holes were cut in the background sheet where the moving foreground figures

needed to show through. During photography the moving sheet was placed first on the

pegs, and the 'slashed' background was placed on top. For the next exposure the same

background sheet was used, but with the next moving sheet under it.

Borrowed by the Bray studio, BarrÉ's assembly-line concept and his perf.-and-peg system

became integral to United States animation production practice.

Another labour-saving practice patented by Bray, but probably pioneered by BarrÉ, was

'in-betweening'. The animator would sketch the beginning and end poses of a sequence,

then the intervening poses would be drawn by lower-paid assistants known as in-

betweeners.

ANIMATION STUDIOS

Besides the studio BarrÉ founded at Edison, he also worked briefly at the International

Film Service and for the Mutt and Jeff series in 1916. He formed a partnership with

Charles Bowers, who had contracted to make the series based on Bud Fisher's comic strip.

Bowers and Fisher eased BarrÉ out of the business in 1919, but the Mutt and Jeff series,

despite changes in studios, staff, and distributors, continued throughout the silent era.

The International Film Service studio was started by William Randolph Hearst in

December 1916. Since Hearst had contractual control over his newspaper cartoonists, it

was a natural business move to exploit their characters in movies. Gregory La Cava,

formerly a minor staffer at BarrÉ's, was hired to supervise the operation. One of his first

moves was to engage his former boss, Raoul BarrÉ. Though there were frequent changes

in personnel, the studio thrived. It ceased operation in 1918, not because it was

unprofitable, but because of political and financial difficulties in the parent company,

Hearst's International News Service. The animators migrated to other studios, including

Bray, which acquired the rights to animate Hearst comic strips in August 1919.

Former Hearst cartoonist Paul Terry, who claimed to have his own cel patents, resisted

Bray's attempts to extract licensing fees. After years of trials and negotiations, an

agreement was finally reached in 1926. Meanwhile Terry had cranked out more than 200

weekly cartoons in his Fables Pictures studio. Though originally the films were whimsical

adaptations of Aesop's fables, the literary conceit was quickly exhausted. Farmer Al Falfa

and other original characters cavorted in the series. In 1928 Terry's partner Amadee Van

Beuren bought a controlling interest in the business, renamed it after himself, and it

became a leading studio in the early 1930s. Terry went on to found Terrytoons, which he

supervised until 1955.

MAX AND DAVE FLEISCHER

The Fleischer brothers broke into the movie business by way of Dave Fleischer's

invention, the rotoscope. The device projected single frames from a strip of movie film

one at a time on to the back of a glass drawing surface. The images could be traced on to

paper or cels and then rephotographed by the normal animation process to obtain

drawings that moved 'realistically' when projected. J. R. Bray put Max and Dave Fleischer

in charge of instructional film production, much of it exploiting the clarity of rotoscoped

images. In April 1920, the 'Out of the Inkwell' series featuring a rotoscoped clown began

appearing irregularly on the Bray programme. Rave reviews in trade journals and even

the New York Times emboldened the animators and they set up their own studio in 1921.

Yet it was not until around 1923 that the clown was given a name: Koko. The premiss of

each 'Out of the Inkwell'was that a cartoonist, played by Max, would bring Koko out of

the ink bottle and place him on the sketch pad whereupon the figure would 'come to life'.

Koko became one of the most important early cartoon stars.

Unfortunately the Fleischers were not as good at business as they were at making films,

and their Red Seal studio foundered in 1926. They settled at Paramount, releasing more

'Out of the Inkwells'with 'Ko-Ko' renamed to secure copyright. In the early 1930s the

Fleischers' Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor eclipsed the clown's stardom.

WALTER LANTZ

The future creator of Woody Woodpecker began his career in animation washing cels for

reuse at the International Film Service, but soon became a director for La Cava. He joined

the Bray studio in 1919, first designing posters and advertisements and then, after Max

Fleischer left in 1921, becoming general supervisor of the animation studio. The first

series he directed for Bray, beginning in 1924, was 'Dinky Doodles', which superimposed

an animated boy character over photographed backgrounds. 'Unnatural Histories' started

in 1925, and 'Hot Dog' (with Pete the Pup) in 1926 (until the studio closed in 1927). In all

these series, Lantz appeared as a congenial actor. He joined Universal in 1928 and one of

his first assignments was to direct 'Oswald the Lucky Rabbit', a character which had been

originated by Disney.

WALT DISNEY

Walter Elias Disney had the good fortune to grow up in Kansas City, Missouri, where

most of the distributors had exchanges for the Midwest region. The owner of one of the

large theatres contracted with Disney and his partner, Ubbe (nicknamed Ub) Iwerks, for a

series of 'Laugh-OGrams', short combinations of cartoon jokes and advertisements. When

the series proved to be a financial failure, Disney moved to California in 1923 in order to

be closer to the film industry. His 'Alice Comedies'were distributed by pioneer cartoon

businesswoman Margaret J. Winkler. Alice was a live character who acted out her

adventures in an animated world. Her companion Julius was a Felix look-alike. Between

1923 and 1927 there were over fifty 'Alices'released. In 1927 Disney and Iwerks created

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and received enthusiastic praise in the trade press. But Charles

Mintz, Margaret Winkler's husband and by then business manager, had secretly set up his

own Oswald studio in New York and hired some of Disney's staff to produce the films

(until Mintz was replaced by Lantz and the series returned to Hollywood).

Disney's response to losing the rights to Oswald was to compete with another animal

character, a black mouse which Iwerks imbued with a Buster Keatonesque personality.

Two Mickey Mouse cartoons were completed in early 1928, but no national distributor

was interested. Disney and his brother Roy decided to plan a sound cartoon. Steamboat

Willie was recorded on the Powers Cinephone (a sound-on-film system with a rather

dubious legal pedigree). It was not the first sound cartoon (the Fleischers and Paul Terry

had beaten Disney to this milestone), but it was the first one with singing, whistling, and

audiovisual percussive effects (such as cats miaowing when their tails were pulled)

specifically designed for sync sound. After the film opened in November 1928, silent

cartoon production was obsolete. The economics of sound film-making caused a

realignment of the industry, with many independents and one major studio -- Sullivan's

-failing to make the change-over.

SULLIVAN AND MESSMER

Otto Messmer was a neophyte cartoonist at the Universal Weekly newsreel in 1915 when

comic strip artist and animator Pat Sullivan walked in to arrange to have some drawings

of his own photographed. Sullivan's personal problems (he was gaoled for raping a minor)

and Messmer's service during the war delayed them but in 1919 they were releasing

cartoons for the Paramount Screen Magazine. One of these, Feline Follies, featured a

mischievous backyard cat -- soon to be known as Felix. In 1921 Margaret Winkler began

to distribute the series and continued to do so until 1925. Despite constant bickering and

lawsuits with Sullivan, Winkler successfully promoted the cat to national prominence.

The studio was run by Otto Messmer, who was in charge of all the details, large and

small. Long before, Sullivan had withdrawn completely from the creative side of Felix

production, focusing only on travel and business arrangements. Increasingly his

alcoholism impaired his ability.

The Felix of this early period was drawn in an angular style and moved in jerky motions

rather like the walk of Chaplin's Tramp character. He was distinguished by a strong

personality which remained consistent from film to film; audiences could identify with

him and would return to see his next cartoon. Animator Bill Nolan, from 1922 to 1924,

redesigned Felix's body to make him more rounded and cuddly -- more like the Felix

dolls that Sullivan so successfully marketed.

The Sullivan studio was based on BarrÉ's model (Sullivan had worked at BarrÉ's briefly;

many of the animators came from there; BarrÉ himself worked on Felix from 1926 to

1928). Though cels were employed, they were background overlays, placed over sheets of

animated drawings on paper. This saved both the expense of cels and Bray-Hurd

licensing. Variations of the slash system were also used sporadically.

Felix the Cat in Pedigreedy ( 1927) by Pat Sullivan, directed by Otto Messmer . Character © Felix the Cat Productions,

Inc.

Felix became the first animated character to gain the attention of the cultural élite, as well

as huge popularity with audiences. He was the subject of praise from Gilbert Seldes, an

American cultural historian, from Marcel Brion, a member of the French Academy, and

from other intellectuals; Paul Hindemith composed a score for a 1928 Felix film. Thanks

to Sullivan's aggressive marketing, the character also became the most successful movie

'ancillary' (until knocked aside by Mickey). Felix's likeness was licensed for all kinds of

consumer products.

In 1925 Sullivan arranged to distribute through the Educational Film Corporation. Its

national network combined with the increasingly creative stories and superb

draughtsmanship of the Felix studio to generate the richest period, both in picture quality

and in revenue. The Felix craze became a world-wide phenomenon.

But the cat's bubble burst at its height of popularity. The demise of the series can be traced

to several factors: the coming of sound, competition from Mickey Mouse, and Sullivan's

draining the organization of its capital (while Disney was channelling every cent back in).

Despite the excellence of such films as Sure-Locked Homes ( 1928), Educational did not

renew its contract and the series went steadily downhill.

HARMAN, ISING, AND SCHLESINGER

When Mintz and Winkler took over Oswald the Rabbit in 1928, they hired Hugh Harman

and Rudolph Ising from Disney's studio to animate it. After Universal retrieved the series

and gave it to Walter Lantz, Harman and Ising formed a partnership and produced a pilot

film called Bosko the Talk-ink Kid in 1929. Entrepreneur Leon Schlesinger saw the

potential of tying in sound films with popular music and obtained backing from Warner

Bros. The film company would pay Schlesinger a fee to 'plug' its sheet music properties

by animating cartoons around the songs. In January 1930 the partnership began producing

'Looney Tunes' (then, in 1931, 'Merrie Melodies'), the kernel of what would become the

Warner Bros. cartoon studio with its memorable stars, beginning with Porky Pig.

ANIMATION IN OTHER NATIONAL CINEMAS

Every country with a significant silent film industry also had a local animation industry.

With the economic advantage gained during the 1914-18 war, the United States film

industry's financial impact on international cinema was reflected in the dissemination of

American cartoons. Cohl's 'Newlyweds' series, for example, was exported to France,

where it was distributed by the parent company, éclair. Chaplin's successful short films

were accompanied by US-made animated versions. BarrÉ's Edison films were distributed

by Gaumont. Margaret Winkler contracted with Pathé to distribute 'Out of the Inkwell'

and 'Felix the Cat' in Great Britain.

Despite foreign competition, there were two areas in which Europeans had the market to

themselves: topical sketches and advertising. The British sketchers, notably Harry

Furniss, Lancelot Speed, Dudley Buxton, George Studdy, and Anson Dyer, entertained

wartime audiences with their propaganda cartoons. Dyer went on to make some

successful short cartoons in the early 1920s, including Little Red Riding Hood ( 1922),

and would become an important producer in the 1930s. Studdy, in 1924, launched a series

of Bonzo films starring a chubby dog. Advertising was a familiar component of the film

programme. Among the notable names producing animated ads were O'Galop and Lortac

in France, Pinschewer, Fischinger, and Seeber in Germany. In a category by itself are the

productions of the State Film Technicum in Moscow. A regular series of entertainment

cartoons (with a social message) appeared from 1924 to 1927, supervised by Dziga

Vertov. The most important animator was Ivan Ivanov-Vano.

Other specialities were puppet and silhouette films. Ladislas Starewitch began his career

in Russia in 1910 and soon was releasing popular one-reel films with puppets and

animated insects for the Khanzhonkov Company. In 1922 he moved to France, where the

puppet film became his life's work. Le Roman du renard, completed in 1930, was the first

animated feature in France.

The important pioneer of the silhouette film was Lotte Reiniger. Her feature Die

Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed ( The Adventures of Prince Ahmed) was released in Berlin

in 1926 and gained world-wide acclaim. Its Arabian Nights story, lively shadow-puppets,

and complicated moving backgrounds took three years to photograph.

Also worth mentioning are Quirino Cristiani and Victor Bergdahl. The former worked in

Argentina and released a political satire, El apóstol ('The apostle'), in 1917. About an hour

in length (about the same as Prince Achmed), it has been called the first feature-length

cartoon. Bergdahl, from 1916 to 1922, animated a Swedish series featuring Kapten Grogg

which was distributed in Europe and in the United States.

As Giannalberto Bendazzi ( 1994) has documented, animation was practised in many

countries throughout the 1920s, both by avant-garde artists and commercially. But despite

the popularity of animation films, the economic realities of the film industry in the 1920s,

and the great cultural diversity in popular graphic humour traditions, made it extremely

difficult for other countries to compete on the world market with the output of the

American studios.

Bibliography

Bendazzi, Giannalberto ( 1994), Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation.

Cabarga, Leslie ( 1988), The Fleischer Story.

Canernaker, John ( 1987), Winsor McCay: His Life and Art.

------ ( 1991), Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat.

Cholodenko, Alan (ed.) ( 1991), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation.

Crafton, Donald ( 1990), Émile Cohl, Caricature and Film.

------ ( 1993), Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928.

Gifford, Denis ( 1987), British Animated Films, 1895-1985: A Filmography.

------ ( 1990), American Animated Films: The Silent Era, 1897-1929.

Maltin, Leonard ( 1980), Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons.

Merritt, Russell, and Kaufman, J. B. ( 1994), Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of

Walt Disney.

Robinson, David ( 1991), 'Masterpieces of Animation, 1833-1908' .

Solomon, Charles ( 1987), Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation.

Ladislas Starewitch (Władysław Starewicz) (1882-1965)

Władisław Starewicz was born in Vilnius -- now the capital of Lithuania but then part of

Poland -- and started his film career making documentaries for the local Ethnographic

Museum. His first animated film was Valka zukov rogachi ('The Battle of Stag-Beetles',

1910), a reconstruction (using preserved specimens) of the nocturnal mating rituals of this

local species, which could not be filmed 'live-action' in the dark.For his first

entertainment film, Prekrasnya Lukanida (The fair Lucanida', 1910), Starewitch

developed the basic technique he would employ for the rest of his life: he built small

puppets from a jointed wooden frame, with parts such as fingers that needed to be flexible

rendered in wire, and parts that need not change cut from cork or modelled in plaster. His

wife Anna, who came from a family of tailors, padded them with cotton and sewed leather

and cloth features and costumes. He designed all the characters and built the settings.

Starewicz moved to Moscow, making animations which range from the impressively grim

The Grasshopper and the Ant ( Strekozai I muraviei, 1911) in which the literalness of the

insects reinforces the cruel message, to the enchanting The Insects' Christmas

( Rozhdyestvo obitateli lyesa, ( 1912). His most astonishing early film, The Cameraman's

Revenge ( Miest kinooperatora, 1911), shows Mrs Beetle having an affair with a

grasshopper-painter, while Mr Beetle carries on with a dragonfly cabaret-artiste, whose

previous lover, a grasshopper-cameraman, shoots movies of Mr Beetle and Dragonfly

making love at the Hotel d'Amour. The cameraman screens these at the local cinema

when Mr and Mrs Beetle are present, and the resulting riot lands both Beetles in jail. This

racy satire of human sexual foibles gains a biting edge from the ridiculousness of bugs

enacting what humans consider their most serious (even tragic) passions -- as when Mrs

Beetle reclines like an odalisque on the divan awaiting the absurd embrace of her lover,

which involves twelve legs and two antennae in lascivious motion. The reflexive

representation of the cinematic apparatus, reaching its apotheosis in the projection of

previous scenes before an audience of animated insects, adds a metaphysical dimension to

the parable.After the Revolution, Starewicz left Russia and settled in France in 1920,

changing his name to Ladislas Starewitch. Here he made 24 films which combine witty

sophistication and magical naïveté, including moral fables such as the splendid The Town

Rat and the Country Rat ( Le Rat de ville et le Rat des champs, 1926) or the lovely La voix

du rossignol ('The nightingale's voice', 1923), adventure epics like The Magic Clock

( L'Horloge magique, 1928), a bitter rendering of Anderson's The Steadfast Tin Soldier

( La Petite Parade, 1928), and a feature-length Reynard the Fox ( Le Roman de Renard,

shot 1929/30, released 1937) which renders the gestures and emotions of the animals (in

sophisticated period costumes) with great subtlety.His 1933 masterpiece The Mascot

( Fétiche mascotte) begins with a live-action sequence starring the Starewitch daughters

Irène and Jeanne (who assisted and acted in most of the films) as a mother who supports

herself making toys, and her sick daughter who longs for an orange. A stuffed dog,

Fétiche, sneaks out at night to steal an orange for the girl, but gets caught at the Devil's

ball, where all the garbage of Paris comes to life in a dissolute orgy at which drunken

stemware suicidally crash into each other, and re-assembled skeletons of eaten fish and

chikens dance. The dog escapes with the orange, pursued home by a motley gang of torn-

paper and vegetable people, dolls and animals. Starewitch nods homage to René Clair's

Dada short Entr'acte in his use of speeding live-action street traffic, the saxophone player

with a balloon head that inflates and deflates as he plays, and the climactic mad, weird

pursuit. Starewitch matches his brilliant visual details with witty use of sound, making the

voices of Fètiche and the Devil whining musical instruments, or playing the Devil's words

backwards to sound like unearthly gibberish.

Charlie Chaplin with other puppet figures in Ladislas Starewitch's Amour noir, Amour blanc ( Love in Black and White,

1928)

WILLIAM MORITZ SELECT FILMOGRAPHY Valka zukov roachi (The Battle of

Stag-Beetles) ( 1910); Strekozai I muraviei (The Grasshopper and the Ant) ( 1911); Miest

kinooperatora (The Cameraman's Revenge) ( 1911); Rozhdyestvo obitateli lyesa (The

Insects' Christmas) ( 1912); L'Épouvantail (The Scarecrow) ( 1921); Les grenouilles qui

demandent un roi (Frogland) ( 1922); La voix du rossignol (The Nightingale's Voice)

( 1923); Le Rat de ville et le Rat des champs (The Town Rat and the Country Rat) ( 1926);

L'Horloge magique (The Magic Clock) ( 1928); La Petite Parade (The Steadfast Tin

Soldier) ( 1928); Le Roman de Renard (The Tale of the Fox) (shot 1929/30, released April

1937); Fétiche mascotte (The Mascot) ( 1933)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Holman, L. Bruce ( 1975), Puppet Animation in the Cinema, History and Technique.

Martin, Léona Béatrice and Françoise Martin ( 1991), Ladislas Starewitch.

Comedy

DAVID ROBINSON

In a bare quarter of a century, the silent cinema created a tradition of film comedy as

distinctive and as selfcontained as the commedia dell'arte -- from which, however

remotely, it seemed to derive something of its character.

The cinema arrived at the end of a century that had witnessed a rich flowering of popular

comedy. Early in the century, both in Paris and in London, archaic theatrical regulations

had forbidden spoken drama in certain theatres, and thus provided unintended stimulus

for the inspired mime of Baptiste Debureau at Les Funambules in Paris, and for the

English burletta, with its special combination of music, song, and mime. Later, the new

proletarian audiences of the great cities of Europe and America found their own theatre in

music hall, variety, and vaudeville. With these popular audiences, comedy was in constant

demand. When life was bad, laughter was a comfort; when it was good, they wanted to

enjoy themselves just the same. Famous comedy mime troupes of the music halls, like the

Martinettis, the Ravels, the Hanlon-Lees, and Fred Karno's Speechless Comedians, can be

seen as direct forerunners of one-reel slapstick films. Karno, in fact, was to train two of

the greatest film comedians, Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel.

BEFORE THE WAR: THE EUROPEAN ERA

The earliest comic films -- still only a minute or less in length -- were generally one-point

jokes often inspired by newspaper cartoons, comic strips, comic postcards, stereograms,

or magic lantern slides. The world's first film comedy, the Lumières' L'Arroseur arrosé

( Watering the Gardener, 1895), was directly derived from a comic strip showing a

naughty boy stepping on a garden hose and then releasing his foot as the unwitting

gardener peers into the nozzle.

By the turn of the century, however, films were growing longer, and film-makers began to

discover the specific qualities of the medium. Georges Méliès and his imitators used

cinematic tricks, like stop action and accelerated movement, for comic effects. In the

years 1905-7 the chase film -- which typically featured an ever-growing crowd of

eccentrics in escalating pursuit of a thief or other malefactor -- became very popular with

audiences. The bestknown exponents of the genre were the directors André Heuze in

France and Alfred Collins in England.

The year 1907 brought a revolution, when the Pathé Company launched a series of

comedies featuring the character Boireau played by the comedian André Deed ( André

Chapuis, born 1884). Deed was the cinema's first true comic star, and achieved

international popularity with his grotesque, infantile, comic character. From Méliès, with

whom he probably worked as an actor, Deed learnt much about the craft of film-making,

and particularly trick effects.

When in 1909 Deed was wooed away from Pathé by the Itala Company of Turin (he was

to return to France two years later), Pathé already had an even greater comic star to take

his place. This comedian, Max Linder, possessed an apparently inexhaustible comic

invention, and was a performer of exquisite skill. The most durable and prolific of Pathé's

stable of comic stars was Charles Prince (born Charles Petit-demange Seigneur), who

made nearly 600 films in the course of ten years, in the character of Rigadin. Other Pathé

comedians included Boucot ( Jean-Louis Boucot), the established variety star Dranem,

Babylas, Little Moritz, the stout Rosalie ( Sarah Duhamel), Cazalis, and the comic

detective Nick Winter ( Léon Durac).

The Boireau and Max series proved an incomparable draw at the box-office and Pathé's

rivals strove to compete. Gaumont poached the comedian Romeo Bosetti from Pathé, and

he directed a Romeo series and a Calino series (starring Clément Migé) before returning

to head Pathé's new Comica and Nizza comedy studios on the Côte d'Azur. Bosetti's

successor at Gaumont was Jean Durand, whose greatest innovation was to create a whole

comic troupe, called Les Pouics, whose orgies of slapstick and destruction were

particularly admired by the surrealists. Out of the group emerged Onésime ( Ernest

Bourbon), who starred in at least eighty films which sometimes rose to truly surreal

fantasy: in Onésime contre Onésime, for instance, he plays his own wicked alter ego

whom he ultimately dismembers and devours. As Léonce, Léonce Perret, subsequently to

become a significant director, specialized in a more sophisticated style of situation

comedy. A plump, cheerful, clubbable man, his comic disasters generally involved social

or amorous mix-ups rather than slapstick farce.

Gaumont's prolific star director, Louis Feuillade, personally directed two comedy series

featuring charming and clever little boys, Bébé ( Clément Mary) and Bout-deZan ( René

Poyen). The Éclair Company's child star, a precocious English boy called Willie

Saunders, had little of their charm but enjoyed brief success in an era when the audience's

appetite for comedy seemed inexhaustible, and led every French film company to develop

its own, albeit often ephemeral, comedy stars.

The Italian cinema developed a parallel but distinctive school of film comedy, which

produced forty comic stars and more than 1,100 films in the six years between 1909 and

1914. At the start of this period Italian cinema was undergoing great industrial expansion.

Giovanni Pastrone, energetically building the fortunes of the Itala Company, recognized

the commercial success of the French comedies which were being imported into Italy, and

lured André Deed to his studio in Turin. Deed's new Italian character of Cretinetti proved

as successful as Boireau, and the hundred or more films he made for Itala assured the

company's prosperity.

Deed's transformation from Boireau to Cretinetti was not unusual in the comedy

production of this era. The character names were regarded as the property of the company,

so that when a comedian changed his allegiance, he had to find a new name. Moreover,

every country where the films were shown tended to rename the character. Thus Deed's

Cretinetti became Foolshead in England and America, Muller in Germany, Lehman in

Hungary, Toribio in the Spanish-speaking countries, and Glupishkin in Russia. In France,

the former Boireau now became Gribouille, only to revert to his original name when he

returned to Pathé in 1911, the change being formally acknowledged with the film

Gribouille redevient Boireau.

The success of the Cretinetti series launched a frantic competition between the companies

to recruit comic stars wherever they could be found -- in circuses, music halls, or the

legitimate theatre. Pastrone launched the Coco series with the actor Pacifico Aquilano. At

the rival Turin studio of Arturo Ambrosio there were Ernesto Vaser as Frico, Gigetta

Morano as Gigetta, and the Spanish Marcel Fabre as Robinet. In Milan, the Milano

Company launched the French comedian E. Monthus as Fortunetti, shortly afterwards

changing his name to Cocciutelli. In Rome, however, Cines discovered the greatest native

comedian of the period, Ferdinand Guillaume, who adopted the successive comic

identities of Tontolini and -- after defecting to the Turin company Pasquali -- Polidor.

Cines also boasted another of the best comics of the period, Kri-Kri, personified by

Raymond Fran, who like Fabre had trained as a clown in the French circus and music

hall. Italian producers took note of the popularity of Bébé and Boutde-Zan, and groomed

their own child stars, Firuli ( Maria Bey) at Ambrosio and Frugolino ( Ermanno Roveri) at

Cines. Cines's most charming and enduring child star was Cinessino, played by the

nephew of Ferdinand Guillaume, Eraldo Giunchi.

The films and their subjects were often repetitive, but this is hardly surprising, given that

they were turned out at the rate of two or more a week. Characteristically, each film

established a particular setting, occupation, and problem for the comedian. Every clown

in turn would be a boxer, a house-painter, a policeman, a fireman, a flirt, a hen-pecked

husband, a soldier. Novelties, fashions, and foibles of the day were all grist to the mill --

motor-cars, aeroplanes, gramophones, the tango craze, suffragettes, temperance

campaigns, unemployment, modern art, the cinema itself. Yet, even in their short, simple

films, the best comedians brought the vitality of their own personality and peculiarities.

Deed/Boireau/Cretinetti was frenetic, with the over-enthusiasm of a child (quite often he

chose to adopt infantine clothes, like sailor suits). More often than not the chains of comic

catastrophe were provoked by his own eagerness to fulfil his chosen role whether as

insurance salesman, paper-hanger, or Red Cross volunteer. In contrast,

Guillaume/Tontolini/Polidor was quaint, sweet, and innocent, the passive victim of comic

holocausts, often finding himself obliged to disguise himself, with delirious and delightful

effect, as a woman. Kri-Kri excelled in gag invention. The handsome Robinet's disasters

generally arose from the manic enthusiasm with which he threw himself into every new

undertaking, whether cycling or ballroom dancing.

Although the Italian school of comedy was originally inspired by the French example and

the immigrant Deed, these films possess something indigenous and inimitable. The streets

and houses and homes, the life and manners of the petty bourgeoisie whose well-ordered

existence our heroes so carefully observe and so recklessly disrupt, convey the world and

concerns of pre-war urban Italy. Although some basic forms of the one-reel comedy may

have been imported, the films of the Italian comics drew heavily and profitably on earlier

native lines of popular comedy -- circus, vaudeville, and an ancient tradition of spettacolo

da piazza which provides a link with the commedia dell'arte.

Other countries enjoyed their smaller share of this brief, prolific period of European film

comedy. In Germany the clown-stars included Ernst Lubitsch and the infant Curt Bois.

The insatiable cinema audiences of Russia had the ever love-lorn Antosha (the Pole,

Antonin Fertner), Giacomo, Reynolds, the fat Djadja Pud ( V. Avdeyev), the simple

peasant Mitjukha ( N. P. Nirov), and the urbane, silkhatted Arkasha ( Arkady Boitler).

Despite a strong music hall tradition, which contributed a number of stars to American

film comedy, Britain's star comics, Winky, Jack Spratt, and the most talented, Pimple

( Fred Evans), showed little of the verve or invention of the French and Italians.

This era of European comedy nevertheless made its own distinctive contribution to the

development of film style. While the cultural pretensions of more prestigious dramatic

and costume films led their makers to borrow style as well as respectability from the

stage, the comedians were unfettered by such inhibitions or ambitions. They ranged

freely; much of the time they shot in the streets, catching the atmosphere of everyday life;

yet at the same time they were employing and exploring all the artifices of camera

trickery. The rhythm of talented mimes was imposed upon the films themselves.

Europe's golden age of comedy was brief, and was ended by the First World War. Many of

the young artists went off to the war and did not return, or never retrieved their prewar

glory after service and war injuries. Film tastes and economies were changing. The Italian

cinema's immediate pre-war boom burst like a bubble when the old markets were

disrupted. Meanwhile, the old comedies were made to seem archaic overnight, in the

blaze of new competitors from the other side of the Atlantic. The American film industry,

already migrating to the open spaces and spectacular natural décors of the West, was

poised to dominate the world cinema industry.

AMERICAN COMEDIES AND MACK SENNETT

America had lagged behind continental Europe in developing name comedians who could

sustain regular series of one-reel films. The first true American comic star of the type was

John Bunny ( 1863-1915), a fat, genial man who had been a successful stage actor and

producer before recognizing the potential of films, and offering himself to the Vitagraph

Company. Although today his films, generally revolving around social mix-ups and

marital spats, seem woefully unfunny, his success with audiences before the First World

War was phenomenal, and encouraged other American companies to try comedy series.

Essanay's Snakeville Comedies introduced 'Alkali Ike' ( Augustus Carney) and 'Mustang

Pete' ( William Todd). Another Essanay series introduced a future star, Wallace Beery, as

Sweedie.

The transformation and pre-eminence of American screen comedy, however, may be

dated from the formation of the Keystone Comedy Studio under Mack Sennett, in 1912.

Keystone was the comedy arm of the New York Motion Picture Company, whose other

Hollywood studios were 101 Bison, producing Thomas Ince's Westerns and historical

films, and Reliance, specializing in dramas. Sennett was Irish-Canadian, an unsuccessful

stage actor who in 1908 had been reduced to working in movies. He was fortunate to be

recruited to the Biograph Studios, where his natural curiosity led him to observe and

absorb the discoveries of Biograph's principal director D. W. Griffith. Along with

Griffith's revolutionary techniques, Sennett studied the comedies coming from France,

and by 1910 had acquired enough skill to be appointed Biograph's principal comedy

director, a post which led to his appointment to run Keystone. He brought with him to

Keystone some of his former Biograph collaborators including Fred Mace, Ford Sterling,

and the beautiful and witty Mabel Normand.

Sennett was uneducated, intelligent, and tough, with an instinctive sense of comedy.

Because he was easily bored himself, he could tell what would hold the audience's

attention and what would not. Having mastered film craft at Biograph, he passed on his

lessons. The Keystone cameramen were dextrous in following the free flight of the

clowns; and the fast Keystone editing was adapted from Griffith's innovatory methods.

Keystone stars and films derived from vaudeville, circus, comic strips, and at the same

time from the realities of early twentieth-century America. Keystone pictures depicted a

world of wide, dusty streets with one-storey clapboard houses, hardware stores and

groceries, dentists' surgeries and saloon bars. The clowns inhabited a familiar world of

kitchens and parlours, seedy hotel lobbies, bedrooms with iron cots and rickety wash-

stands, bowler hats and wild beards, feathered hats and harem skirts, ModelTs and horses-

and-buggies. Comedy at Keystone was a wild caricature of the ordinary joys and terrors

of everyday life, and the guiding rule was to keep things moving, to allow the audience no

pause for breath or critical reflection. Sennett built up a stock company of outrageous

grotesques and fearless acrobats, including Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle -- a fat man with great

comedy style and dexterity -- cross-eyed Ben Turpin, walrus-whiskered Billy Bevan and

Chester Conklin, giant Mack Swain, obese Fred Mace. Other comedians who emerged

from the Keystone Studio included the future stars Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon,

Charlie Chase, who became a notable director as Charles Parrott, Charles Murray, Slim

Summerville, Hank Mann, Edgar Kennedy, Harry McCoy, Raymond Griffith, Louise

Fazenda, Polly Moran, Minta Durfee, and Alice Davenport. At least two Keystone Kops,

Eddie Sutherland and Edward Cline, as well as two Sennett gagmen, Malcolm St Clair

and Frank Capra, later became notable comedy directors in their own right.

The Keystone comedies remain a monument of early twentieth-century popular art,

transmuting the evident surfaces of the life and times of the 1910s and 1920s into a

comedy that is basic and universal. The Keystone shorts were uncompromisingly

anarchic. In an era of determinedly materialistic values, the Sennett films celebrated

orgiastic destruction of goods and possessions, of cars and houses and china ornaments.

As in all the best comedy, authority and dignity were tumbled and ridiculed.

Sennett's greatest year was 1914, when his most famous star, Charlie Chaplin, won world

fame for himself and the studio in a few months of phenomenal discovery, innovation,

and comedy creation. When his one-year Keystone contract expired, Chaplin, recognizing

his immense commercial value, asked for a large raise on his $150 a week salary. Sennett,

short-sightedly perhaps, was unwilling to meet his demands. Chaplin was to move in turn

to the Essanay Studios and contracts with Mutual and First National which gave him the

increased independence of operation which he craved. Keystone survived the loss, but the

Chaplin year had been the studio's apogee.

Sennett's success at Keystone spurred many rival studios, some short-lived, to set up in

comedy production. His most serious rival was Hal Roach, who teamed up with a fellow

film extra, Harold Lloyd, to make a comedy series starring Lloyd as Willie Work, a pale

imitation of Chaplin's Tramp. Subsequent collaborations fared better, and the creation of

Lloyd's bespectacled 'Harold' character launched their careers to joint success. After the

parting with Lloyd, Roach was inspired to team two comedians who had been working

solo for years. Laurel and Hardy were to pass into universal mythology, the sublime

partnership of the tiny, diffident, tearful Stan with the large, pompous, unwisely over-

confident Ollie.

The style of the Roach stars over the years -- Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the troupe of child

comedians Our Gang, Thelma Todd and ZaSu Pitts, Charlie Chase, Will Rogers, Edgar

Kennedy, Snub Pollard -- exemplify the difference between Roach and Sennett. The

latter's films tended to frenetic action and slapstick. Roach preferred well-constructed

stories and a more restrained, realistic, and ultimately more sophisticated style of

character comedy. Harold Lloyd and Stan and Ollie are recognizably human, sharing the

foibles, feelings, and anxieties of an audience which is also engaged in the permanent

battle with the perilous uncertainties of the contemporary world.

THE HEYDAY OF SILENT COMEDY

At least until 1913 the standard length of a film was one reel; multi-reel feature films

were at first resisted in many quarters of the film trade. It was, then, a dramatic revolution

when Sennett announced the first multi-reel comedy at the end of 1914. Tillie's Punctured

Romance ( 1914) was designed to star the famous comedienne Marie Dressler in an

adaptation of one of her stage successes. Charlie Chaplin was cast as her leading man.

Despite the success of this film, it was to be several years before the feature-length

comedy was established. Chaplin made his first two-reeler, Dough and Dynamite ( 1914),

at Keystone, but not until 1918 and A Dog's Life did he embark on featurelength films.

Keaton made his first feature in 1920, Lloyd in 1921, Harry Langdon in 1925.

Harold Lloyd in For Heaven's Sake ( 1926)

Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon -- the four giants of American silent film comedy --

all emerged from the oneand two-reeler period to reach the apogee of their careers in the

1920s. Chaplin trained in the British music hall and, in the manipulation of the image at

Keystone, created in his Tramp character the most universal fictional human image in

history. Like Chaplin, Keaton was above all a highly accomplished actor, who gave each

of the characters he played-they ranged from millionaires to cowhands-its own validity.

The myth of 'The Great Stone Face' misrepresents his startlingly expressive face and still

more eloquent body. A lifetime of creating comedy and solving stage problems (he was

working professionally from the age of three) gave him an impeccable sense of comic

structure and mise-en-scéne. The characteristic, escalating Keaton gag enchainments

make him the equal of any director working in 1920s Hollywood.

Harold Lloyd was exceptional among the silent film comedians since his background and

training were not in vaudeville. Stage-struck from youth, he had worked in little stock

companies before landing a job as a $5-a-day extra at Universal Studios, where he met

Hal Roach. Lloyd joined Sennett after the Willie Work films and a disagreement with

Roach; but they reunited to make a new series, with Lloyd as a hayseed, Lonesome Luke.

The films proved successful enough; but in 1917 Lloyd put on a pair of horn-rim glasses

for a film called Over the Fence ( 1917), and discovered a far better character which was

to bring him lasting fame. The Harold character evolved through a series of shorts, and

was fully formed by the time of his first feature A Sailor-Made Man ( 1921). Harold was

always aspiring to be the all-American boy, the Horatio Alger hero, an enthusiastic go-

getter. The drive for social or economic betterment that always motivates the plot of a

Lloyd comedy probably represented a sincere moral beliefLloyd was in real life the

embodiment of his own success stories.

With Safety Last ( 1923) Lloyd introduced the special style of comedy of thrills with

which his name is always associated. The plot somehow called upon the innocent Harold

to take the place of a human fly; and the last third of the picture is a rising crescendo of

gags as Harold encounters ever more horrible hazards in attempting to scale the side of a

skyscraper. Lloyd's eleven silent features, including Grandma's Boy ( 1922), The

Freshman ( 1925), and the culminating The Kid Brother ( 1927) and Speedy ( 1928), were

among the biggest-earning comedies of the 1920s, even outgrossing Chaplin's films.

Harry Langdon's output was smaller and more uneven than the others; but he merits his

place in the pantheon of great clowns on the strength of three features, Tramp, Tramp,

Tramp, The Strong Man (both 1926), and Long Pants ( 1927) -- the first scripted by Frank

Capra, the others directed by him. Langdon's screen character is quiet, cute, and rather

weird. His round, white face and podgy figure, his tight-fitting clothes, and his stiff

slightly uncontrolled movements give him the look, as James Agee pointed out, of an

elderly baby. This childlike, guileless quality gives an eerie edge to his encounters with

the grown-up world of sexuality and sin.

In this enchanted age of comedy, the reputation of other comedians has been unjustly

eclipsed. Raymond Griffith emulated the sartorial elegance of Max Linder and

encountered catastrophes and peril with insouciant ingenuity; his masterpiece Hands Up!

( 1926) cast him as a Civil War spy. Marion Davies's fame as the mistress of William

Randolph Hearst has eclipsed her contemporary celebrity as a comedienne of particular

charm whose fun was seen at its best in the films in which King Vidor directed her, Show

People and The Patsy (both 1928). The Canadian-born entertainer Beatrice Lillie left her

mark in a single wonderful silent comedy, Exit Smiling ( 1927). Migrants from Europe,

the Italian Monty Banks ( Monte Bianchi) and the English Lupino Lane enjoyed

successful if brief starring careers; Banks subsequently turned director. Larry Semon, with

his distinctive white mask like a Pierrot lunaire started the 1920s as Hollywood's highest-

paid comedian, but his later features met with diminishing success, and hardly bear

revival today. W. C. Fields and Will Rogers made sporadic forays into silent films, though

their essentially verbal style of comedy was only to come into its own in the era of talking

pictures.

The extraordinary flowering of silent film comedy in Hollywood was not to any great

extent reflected anywhere else in the world -- perhaps indeed because American comedies

enjoyed such huge international distribution and popularity that there was no chance of

competing with them. In Britain, Betty Balfour, who made two feature films in her

character of Squibs, was the nearest to a star comedienne: attempts to put popular music

hall comedians on the screen lacked both skill and success. In Germany the child star of

1909, Curt Bois, grew up to be the bright star of a few comedies, the best of them The

Count from Pappenheims. In France René Clair brought the comedy style of the French

stage vaudeville to the screen with The Italian Straw Hat ( Un chapeau de paille d'Italie,

1927) and Les Deux Timides ( 1928). But screen comedy was distinctly an American art

form.

It was to remain so, although the golden age of silence was abruptly extinguished with the

coming of sound. The causes were manifold. Some comedians were disoriented by the

fact of sound itself ( Raymond Griffith was an extreme case, having a severe throat defect

which restricted his power of speech). The new techniques -- the microphones and the

cameras enclosed in sound-proof booths -suddenly restricted the freedom of film-makers.

More important the escalating costs and profits of film-making led to much closer

production supervision, which generally proved inimical to the independence which had

been vital to the working methods of the best comedians. Rare ones, like Chaplin and

Lloyd, were able to win themselves freedom of operation for a few more years, but

others, including Keaton and Langdon, found themselves employees of huge film

factories which had no place or concern for individualists. After 1929 Keaton never

directed another film, and Langdon vanished into obscurity. A new art had been born, had

flowered, and died in little more than a quarter of a century.

Bibliography

Kerr, Walter ( 1975), The Silent Clowns.

Lahue, Kalton C. ( 1966), World of Laughter.

------ ( 1967), Kops and Custard.

McCaffrey, Donald W. ( 1968), Four Great Comedians.

Montgomery, John ( 1954), Comedy Films: 1894-1954.

Robinson, David ( 1969), The Great Funnies: A History of Film Comedy.

Buster Keaton (1895-1966)

Of all the great silent comedians, Buster Keaton is the one who suffered the worst eclipse

with the coming of sound but whose reputation has recovered the best. He was born

Joseph Francis Keaton, in Piqua, Kansas, where his parents were appearing in a medicine

show. Nicknamed Buster by fellow artist Harry Houdini, he joined his parents' act while

still a baby. By the age of 5 he was already an accomplished acrobat and was soon billed

as star of the show. In 1917 the family act broke up. Buster went to work with Roscoe

(Fatty) Arbuckle at his Comique film studios in New York and then followed Arbuckle

and producer Joe Shenck to California at the end of the year. He worked with Arbuckle

for a couple of years, learning filmcraft with the same dedication as he had given to

stagecraft, but struck out on his own, with Schenck's backing, in 1921. Between then and

1928, with Schenck as his constant mentor and producer (and also brother-in-law, since

each had married one of the Talmadge sisters), he starred in some twenty shorts and a

dozen features, almost all of which he directed himself and on which he enjoyed total

creative freedom. To this period belong such classics as The Navigator ( 1924), The

General ( 1926), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. ( 1928). The coming of sound brought an even

more abrupt end to his career than to those of many other artists of the silent period.

Losing Schenck's patronage, he joined MGM as a salaried contract artist with no creative

control. His marriage to Natalie Talmadge broke up definitively in 1932. In the last

twenty-five years of his life, which was plagued with personal problems, he struggled to

keeep his career alive. Throughout the early sound years and into the 1940s he appeared

in numerous second-rate films which gave little scope for his unique silent persona. But

he was largely forgotten by the public until invited to play opposite Chaplin in a brilliant

cameo in the latter's Limelight ( 1951). His career began to pick up and his financial and

personal difficulties lessened. His last film appearance was in Richard Lester's A Funny

Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1965.

Keaton was above all a consummate professional. A brilliant and extremely courageous

acrobat, he devised the most elaborate gags and performed them with extraordinary

aplomb. Only rarely did he have recourse to tricks and special effects, and when he did

the effects often constitute gags of their own, almost as ingenious as his own

performances. Sometimes the effects are transparent, as in the transitions between reality

and fantasy in Sherlock Jr. ( 1924); sometimes they are concealed, as with the mechanism

that controls the mysterious behaviour of the doors in The Navigator. In Our Hospitality

( 1923), where the rescue of the heroine intercuts shots which really are on the raging

rapids with studio mock-ups, the basic effect remains one of realism. The sense of being

in a real world, full of real, if recalcitrant, objects, provides an essential context for those

moments in Keaton films in which objects -- as in the much imitated gag of the sinking

lifebelt -- do not behave in realistic ways.

Buster Keaton in The Navigator ( 1924)

Keaton's mastery of timing -- the natural comedian's stock-in trade -- was extraordinary.

From very early on, however, he extended it from the field of acting performance into that

of extended mise-en-scéne. He developed running gags and constructed comic scenes

which lasted for several minutes and delpoyed extensive resources, often centred around

moving objects such as trains or motor-bikes. Control of the architecture of these scenes

was as important as the comic business carried by his performance. When the house in

One Week ( 1920) is demolished, not by the train the audience expects to destory it, but

by another one steaming in from a different angle, and the hero is left bemused and

forlorn among the wreckage, it is hard to say whether it is Keaton he director or Buster

the performer who is most to be admired. The saddest feature of his later films, from

Spite Marriage ( 1929) onwards, is not the loss of his performing talent but the fact that

he could no longer construct entire films in which to develop it.But Keaton's gags would

be mere pyrotechnics were it not for the personality of Buster himself. A slight figure,

with a seemingly impassive face, generally equipped with a straw hat placed (to borrow T.

S. Eliot's phrase about Cavafy) at a slight angle to the universe, Buster was the perennial

innocent plunged into ridiculous and impossible situations and emerging unscathed throuh

a mixture of obstinacy and unexpected resource. Unlike Chaplin or Lloyd, the Buster

persona makes no appeal to the audience. He is a blank sheet, on whom testing

circumstances and awakening sexual desire gradually impose a character. At the outset he

Buster character tends to be a dreamer or a fantasist, blissfully unaware of the gap

between reality and fantasy or the obstacles that might stand in the path of realizing his

desire. Faced with recalcitrant objects or hostile fellow-beings, he remains unfazed,

tackling each obstacle with grim determination and expedients of greater and greater

daring and extremity. By the end when he (usually) wins the girl, he has become wiser to

the world, but his innocence remains.In September 1965, Keaton, now nearly 70, made a

personal appearance at the Venice film Festival, where he was tumultuously applauded.

He died of cancer a few months later.

GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH SELECT FILMOGRAPHY Short films The Butcher

Boy (with Roscoe Arbuckle) ( 1917); Back Stage (with Roscoe Arbuckle) ( 1919); One

Week ( 1920); Neighbors ( 1920); The Goat ( 1921); The Playhouse ( 1921); The Paleface

( 1921); Cops ( 1922); The Frozen North ( 1922) Keaton -- Schenck features Three Ages (

1923); Our Hospitality ( 1923); Sherlock Jr. ( 1924); The Navigator ( 1924); Seven

Chances ( 1924); Go West ( 1925); Battling Butler ( 1926); The General ( 1926); College

( 1927); Steamboat Bill, Jr. ( 1928) MGM productions (silent period) The Cameraman

( 1928); Spite Marriage ( 1929)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blesh, Rudi ( 1967), Keaton.

Keaton, Buster ( 1967), My Wonderful World of Slapstick.

Robinson, David ( 1969), Buster Keaton.

Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)

At the age of 24, after only a few days in pictures and a single film appearance, Charles

Chaplin created the comic character that was to bring him world fame, and which even

today remains the most universally recognized fictional representation of human kind --

an icon both of comedy and the movies themselves.

Chaplin's little Tramp appears to have been a spontaneous, unpremeditated creation. On

or about 5 January 1914, deciding that he needed a new comic persona for his next one-

reel film, he went into the wardrobe shack at the Keystone Studios, and emerged in the

costume, make-up and character more or less as we still know it. He had invented many

stage characters before, and he would continue to experiment with others on the screen;

but no figure that he or any other comedian created would ever be so potent.

Chaplin's first ten years had witnessed more tribulation than most human beings ever

encounter in long lifetimes. His father, a moderately successful singer on the London

music halls -- apparently exasperated by his wife's infidelities -- abandoned his family,

and succumbed to alcoholism and early death. His mother, a less successful music hall

artist, intermittently struggled to maintain Charles and his half-brother Sydney. As her

health and mind broke down -- she was eventually permanently confined to mental

hospitals -- the children spent extended periods in public institutions. By his tenth year

Charles Chaplin was familiar with poverty, hunger, madness, drunkenness, the cruelty of

the poor London streets and the cold impersonality of public institutions. Chaplin

survived, developing his selfreliance.

At ten years old he went to work first in a clog-dance act and then in comic roles; and by

the time he jointed Fred Karno's Speechless Comedians in 1908 he was well versed in

every kind of stage craft.

Karno was a London impresario who had built his own comedy industry, maintaining

several companies, with a 'fun factory' to develop and rehearse sketches, to train

performers, and to prepare scenery and properties. An inspired judge of comedy, Karno

groomed several generations of talented comedians, including Stan Laurel and Chaplin

himself. In length, form and knockabout mime, Karno's sketches closely anticipated the

classic one-reel comedy of the early cinema.

While touring he United States as the star of a Karno sketch company, Chaplin was

offered a contract by the Keystone film company. Mack Sennett, its chief, was very much

the Hollywood equivalent of Karno -- an impresario with a special gift for broad comedy.

After a tentative first film, Making a Living, Chaplin devised his definitive role (the

costume was first seen in 1914 in Kid Auto Races at Venice) and embarked on a series of

one-reel films that within months made him a household name. The potency of the Tramp

was that in creating this character, Chaplin used all the experience of humanity he had

absorbed in his first ten years, and transformed it into the comic art he had so completely

mastered in the apprenticeship of the years that had followed.

Dissatisfied with the breakneck Keystone pace that give him no chance to develop his

subtler comedy style, Chaplin quickly persuaded Sennett to let him direct, and after June

1914 was always to be his own director. He left Sennett at the end of the year's contract,

moving from company to company in search of greater rewards and also, more important

in his view, greater creative independence.

The Little Tramp prospecting in the harsh conditions of the Yukon: The Gold Rush ( 1925)

The one-and two-reel films he made at Keystone ( 1914, 35 films), Essanay ( 1915, 14

films) and for distribution by the Mutual Company ( 1916-17, 12 films) show a

continuous progression: many feel that he never surpassed the best of the Mutual films,

which include One A.M., The Pawnshop, Easy Street and The Immigrant. Chaplin

revealed qualities that were then quite new to film comedy -mime that achieved the

highest level of acting art, pathos, and daring commentary on social issues.In 1918 he

built his own studio, where he was to work for the next 33 years in conditions of

unparalleled independence. A brilliant series of short features for distribution by First

National included Shoulder Arms ( 1918), a comedic vision of the First World War, The

Pilgrim ( 1923), which tilts at religious bigotry, and The Kid ( 1921), a unique, rich

sentimental comedy in which more than anywhere else Chaplin exposes the lingering pain

of his own childhood experience of poverty and public charity.With Douglas Fairbanks,

Mary Pickford and D.W.Griffith, Chaplin co-founded United Artists, in 1919, and all his

subsequent American-made features were to be released through this concern. His first

UA picture A Woman of Paris ( 1923), a brilliant and innovative social comedy, was

rejected by the public at large since Chaplin himself did not appear, apart from an

uncredited walkon. In The Gold Rush ( 1925) he made high comedy out of the privations

of the Klondyke prospectors. No less inspired, The Circus ( 1928), a troubled production

that coincided with divorce proceedings by his second wife, also had bitter

undertones.Knowing that speech would mark the end of the Tramp, Chaplin temporized

throughout the 1930s with two more silent films, with music and effects as concessions to

the sound era. City Lights ( 1931) is an unfailingly effective sentimental comedy-

melodrama; Modern Times ( 1936), in which the Tramp made his farewell, is a comic

commentary on the machine age, whose satire still retains its bite.Chaplin felt increasing

responsibility to use his comic gifts for critical commentary on his times. He courted

grave unpopularity in isolationist America with his satire on Hitler and Mussolini, The

Great Dictator ( 1940); and risked even more, in the first days of Cold War paranoia, with

Monsieur Verdoux ( 1946), in which he ironically compared the activities of a Landru-

style mass murderer with the wholesale killing licensed by war.Chaplin's situation in

America was already insecure. His outspoken liberal views, his appeal to leftish thinkers

and his refusal to take American nationality had long made him anathema to the FBI,

which had files on him stretching back to the 1920s. The Bureau pushed an unstable

young woman, Joan Barry, into bringing a series of charges, including a paternity claim,

against Chaplin. The paternity claim was later proved to be false; but the mud stuck, and

the FBI went on to manipulate a smear campaign charging Chaplin with Communist

sympathies. Limelight ( 1952), a dramatic film set in the theatrical London of Chaplin's

childhood, and dealing with the difficulties of making comedy and the fickleness of the

public, seemed at once a reflection on his own impaired reputation and a retreat into

nostalgia.When Chaplin left for Europe for the London premiere of Limelight, the FBI

persuaded the Attorney General to rescind the re-entry permit that, as an alien, he

required. He was to spend the rest of his life in Europe, returning only briefly in 1972 to

accept an honorary Oscar and fulsome eulogies that seemed to be Hollywood's atonement.

His home from 1953 was in Vevey, Switzerland, where he lived with his wife, the former

Oona O'Neill, and a family that eventually numbered eight children.He continued to work

in exile. The uneven A King in New York ( 1957) ridiculed America's McCarthyist

paranoia. Though hurt by the poor press for his last film, A Countess from Hong Kong

( 1967), starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, Chaplin worked, almost to the end, on

a new project The Freak. In addition he produced two autobiographical volumes, and

composed musical scores for his old silent films. Knighted in 1975, Sir Charles Chaplin

died on Christmas Day 1977.In recent years Chaplin's achievement has sometimes been

underestimated by critics without historical perspective, or perhaps influenced by the

public smears of the 1940s. His popularity contributed much to Hollywood's prosperity

and rise to worldwide pre-eminence in the period of the First World War. The

sophisticated intelligence and skills he brought to slapstick comedy forced intellectuals to

recognise that art could reside in a wholly popular entertainment, and not just in those

selfconsciously 'artistic' products with which the cinema first tried to court respectability.

In the 1910s and 20s Chaplin's Tramp, combating a hostile and unrewarding world with

cheek and gallantry, afforded a talisman and champion to the underprivileged millions

who were the cinema's first mass audience.

DAVID ROBINSON SELECT FILMOGRAPHY Kid Auto Races at Venice ( 1914);

Tillie's Punctured Romance ( 1914); The Champion ( 1915); The Tramp ( 1915); A

Woman ( 1915); A Night at the Show ( 1915); Police ( 1915); One A.M. ( 1916); The

Pawnshop ( 1916); Behind the Screen ( 1916); Easy Street ( 1917); The Cure ( 1917); The

Immigrant ( 1917); A Dog's Life ( 1918); Shoulder Arms ( 1918); The Kid ( 1921); The

Pilgrim ( 1923); A Woman of Paris ( 1923); The Gold Rush ( 1925); The Circus ( 1928);

City Lights ( 1931); Modern Times ( 1936); The Great Dictator ( 1940); Monsieur

Verdoux ( 1946); Limelight ( 1952); A King in New York ( 1957); A Countess From Hong

Kong ( 1967).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chaplin, Charles ( 1964), My Autobiography.

Huff, Theodore ( 1951), Charlie Chaplin.

Lyons, Timothy J. ( 1979), Charles Chaplin, A Guide to References and Resources.

McCabe, John ( 1978), Charlie Chaplin.

Robinson, David ( 1985), Chaplin, His Life and Art.

Documentary

CHARLES MUSSER

The term 'documentary' did not come into popular use until the late 1920s and 1930s. It

was initially applied to various kinds of 'creative' non-fiction screen practice in the post-

First World War, classical cinema era. Originating films in the category have typically

included Robert Flah erty 's Nanook of the North ( 1922), various Soviet films of the

1920s such as Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera ( Chelovek s

kinoapparatom, 1929), Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a City ( Berlin: die

Sinfonie der Größstadt, 1927), and John Grierson's Drifters ( 1929). Yet 'documentary'

cinema has roots that lie further back in the reworking of a vital and long-established

form that had flourished throughout the second half of the nineteenth centurythe

illustrated lecture. Early documentarians used the magic lantern to create complex and

often sophisticated programmes out of a succession of projected photographic images

accompanied by a live narration, with an occasional use of music and sound effects. By

the turn of the century, films were gradually replacing slides while intertitles usurped the

function of the lecture -- changes that eventually gave rise to the new terminology. The

documentary tradition preceded film and has continued into the era of television and

video, thus being redefined in the light of technological innovations, as well as in the

context of shifting social and cultural forces.

ORIGINS

The use of projected images for documentary purposes can be traced back to the mid-

seventeenth century, when the Jesuit Andreas Tacquet gave an illustrated lecture about a

missionary's trip to China. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the magic lantern

was often used to give audio-visual programmes on science (particularly astronomy),

current affairs, travel, and adventure.

The ability to transfer photographic images on to glass and project them with the lantern

was a crucial leap forward in documentary practice. Lantern slide images not only

achieved a new ontological status but became much smaller and easier to produce.

Frederick and William Langenheim, German-born brothers then residing in Philadelphia,

achieved this result in 1849 and showed examples of their work at the Great Exhibition in

London in 1851. By the mid-1860s the use of these slides in travel lectures had become

popular in eastern cities of the United States, with an evening's programme typically

focusing on a single foreign country. In June 1864, for instance, New York audiences

could see The Army of the Potomac, an illustrated lecture on the Civil War using

photographs taken by Alexander Gardner and Mathew Brady. Although the magic lantern

had been used primarily to evoke the mystical or fantastic in the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries, by the late 1860s it was being used predominantly for documentary

purposes and was assigned new names as a result -- the 'stereopticon' in the United States

and the 'optical lantern' in England.

These documentary-like illustrated lectures flourished in western Europe and North

America. In the United States, several exhibitors toured the principal cities, giving a

series of four or five programmes which changed from year to year. In the last three

decades of the nineteenth century, many noteworthy documentary-like programmes were

given by adventurers, archaeologists, and explorers. Programmes on the Arctic were

particularly popular from 1865 onward, and often displayed an ethnographic bent.

Lieutenant Robert Edwin Peary interrupted his efforts to reach the North Pole by

presenting travelogue-style lectures in the early and mid-1890s. Displaying 100 lantern

slides in his 1896 lecture, Peary not only recounted his journey from Newfoundland to the

Polar ice cap in heroic terms but offered an ethnographic study of the Inuit or

'Esquimaux'.

Similar kinds of programme were offered in Europe. Magic lantern activities flourished

particularly in Britain, where the colonial agenda was strong: Egypt was a favourite topic,

and illustrated lectures such as War in Egypt and the Soudan ( 1887) were big money-

makers. Victorian audiences also savoured lantern shows featuring local towns and

countryside unaffected by the industrial revolution, including several series of slides made

by photographer George Washington Wilson ( The Road to the Isles, c. 1885).

Illustrated lectures about seemingly primitive, impoverished peoples in distant locales had

their counterpart in lantern shows on the urban poor. In Britain programmes such as Slum

Life in our Great Cities ( c. 1890) treated poverty in a picturesque fashion, often

attributing it to alcoholism. In the United States the social issue documentary began with

Jacob Riis, who gave his first programme, How the Other Half Lives and Dies, on 25

January 1888. It focused on recent immigrant groups, particularly Italians and Chinese,

who lived in poverty and germinfested slums.

By the early 1890s highly portable 'detective' cameras allowed amateur and professional

photographers to take candid pictures, often without the knowledge or permission of their

subjects. Alexander Black used pictures he took of his Brooklyn neighbourhood to give

an illustrated lecture he alternatively titled Life through a Detective Camera and

Ourselves as Others See Us.

Most of the basic genres of documentary -- covering travel, ethnography and archaeology,

social issues, science, and war -- were in place before the arrival of cinema. Many were

evening-length single-subject programmes, while others were much shorter, designed to

occupy a twenty-minute slot on a vaudeville bill or as part of a multi-subject, magazine-

style format. Ethical issues about the relationship between documentarians and their

subjects had been encountered, though rarely given much attention. In short, documentary

screen practice had become an important part of middle-class cultural life in Europe and

North America during the second half of the nineteenth century.

FROM SLIDES TO FILM

As film-making spread rapidly through Europe and North America in 1894-7, non-fiction

subjects predominated, for they were easier and generally less expensive to produce than

fiction films using sets and performers. The Lumières sent cameramen such as Alexandre

Promio to countries in Europe, North and Central America, Asia, and Africa, where they

shot groups of films that appropriated subjectmatter and even compositions from earlier

lantern views designed for travel lectures. Cameramen in other countries followed the

Lumières' lead. In England Robert Paul sent cinematographer H. W. Short to Egypt in

March 1897 (producing An Arab Knife Grinder at Work) and took a dozen films himself

in Sweden that July ( A Laplander Feeding his Reindeer). James H. White of the Edison

Manufacturing Company toured through Mexico ( Sunday Morning in Mexico), the

western United States, Hawaii, China, and Japan ( Japanese Sampans) over ten months in

1897-8.

British cameraman. J. B. McDowell in the trenches

News films were also frequently taken; seven were made of the Tsar's coronation in

Russia, including the Lumières' Czar et Czarine entrant dans l'église de l'Assoinption

('Tsar and Tsarina entering the Church of the Assumption', May 1896), and sporting

events were also a popular subject, Paul filming The Derby in 1895. In smaller or less

developed countries, local film-makers quickly emerged to take these actualities': in Italy,

Vittorio Calina shot Umberto e Margherita di Savoia a passeggio per il parco ('King

Umberto and Margherita of Savoy strolling in the park', 1896); in Japan Tsunekichi

Shibata took films of the Ginza, Tokyo's fashionable shopping district, in 1897; in Brazil,

Alfonso Segreto began to take news and actuality films during 1898.

The very earliest motion pictures, whether Sandow ( Edison, 1894), Bucking Broncho

( Edison, 1894), Rough Sea at Dover ( Paul-Acres, 1895), The German Emperor

Reviewing His Troops ( Acres, 1895), or Sortie d'usine (Workers Leaving the Lumikre

Factory, Lumière, 1895), had 'documentary value' but did not necessarily function within

'the documentary tradition'. Exhibitors often projected these non-fiction films in a variety

format, interspersed with fiction films. The location of a given view was usually well

labelled either in the programme or by a lecturer, but narrative and a sustained treatment

of a specific subject were thwarted.

This 'cinema of attractions' approach continued to be popular, but it rapidly began to be

balanced by the efforts of exhibitors to sequence films of related subject-matter, in many

instances through an extended narrative. In England, for example, exhibitors routinely

grouped together five or six films of Queen Victoria's Jubilee ( June 1897) in an effort to

cover the event. Each 'film' was generally one shot long and in an increasing number of

instances each film was introduced by a title slide; often a lecturer or 'spieler'

accompanied the screening with verbal explanations as well.

By 1898, exhibitors in different countries had begun to integrate slides and films into full-

length documentarylike programmes. At the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science ( New

York) in April 1897, Henry Evans Northrop interspersed Lumière films through his

lantern show A Bicycle Trip through Europe. Dwight Elmendorf gave a popular illustrated

lecture, The Santiago Campaign ( 1898), which supplemented his own slides with Edison

films of the Spanish-American War. Many programmes on the Spanish-American War

combined actuality views with staged or 're-enacted' events as well as fictional vignettes,

posing the problem of generic specificity that continues to this day. In England, Alfred

John West produced a fulllength show of slides and films, West's Our Navy ( 1898),

which ran for many years and proved effective propaganda for the British Admiralty.

By the turn of the century, production companies shot groups of short films on a single

theme that were then exhibited together, either as a short subject or as part of a longer

slide-film presentation. The Charles Urban Trading Company ( London) supplied news

films of the Russo-Japanese War: in the United States, Burton Holmes acquired and used

them for his full-length slide-film lecture Port Arthur: Siege and Surrender ( 1905), while

Lyman Howe showed the same films but as one portion of his two-hour, magazine-style

format. In the United States at least, professional illustrated lecturers were regularly

combining slides and films into full-length documentary programmes by 1907-8.

With the rise of the story film between 1901 and 1905, non-fiction film lost its

domination of the world's movie screens. Increasingly it was relegated to the margins of

industrial practice. News films posed a particular problem. Unlike fiction films, they

quickly became dated, losing their commercial value and their attraction for exhibitors

and distributors. Only films showing events of earthshaking importance tended to sell.

This problem was solved when Pathé-Frères began to distribute a weekly newsreel, Pathé

Journal, in 1908, first in Paris and, by the following year, throughout France, Germany,

and England. Pathé Weekly débuted in the United States on 8 August 1911, and was

rapidly followed by several American imitations.

Documentary-type programmes continued to appeal to middle-class and genteel

audiences, and performed a range of significant ideological functions. They were

frequently employed as propaganda for the colonial agenda of industrialized nations. The

Anglo-Boer war was extensively photographed and filmed from a British perspective in

1899-1900. After 1905 numerous films were taken in the British, French, German, and

Belgian colonies of Central Africa, including Chasse à l'hippopotame sur le Nil Bleu

('Hunting hippopotamus on the Blue Nile', Pathé, 1907), Matrimonio abissino

(Abyssinian marriage', Roberto Omenga , 1908), and Leben und Treiben in Tangka ('Life

and events in Tangka', Deutsche-Bioskop, 1909). Many nonfiction films, such as Making

of a Newspaper ( Urban, 1904), depicted work processes which celebrated the technology

of production, while showing workers as peripheral to these achievements. Innumerable

depictions of royalty, activities of the rich, and military forces on parade or manceuvres

all tended to offer a reassuring picture of the world scene. On the eve of World War, these

non-fiction programmes generally lacked both critical perspective and any awareness of

the catastrophe that loomed.

Many of the earliest feature films were full-length illustrated lectures using only motion

pictures. These included Coronation of King George V (Kinemacolor, 1911), although the

majority were still 'travelogues'. By the end of the 1910s no major expedition was

complete without a film cameraman, and many produced popular films: Roping Big

Game in the Frozen North ( 1912), taken on the Carnegie Alaska-Siberian Expedition by

Captain F. E. Kleinschmidt; Captain Scott's South Pole Expedition (Gaumont, 1912).

Others featured underwater photography ( Thirty Leagues under the Sea, George and

Ernest Williamson, 1914) or returned to Africa ( Through Central Africa, James Barnes,

1915) and the poles ( Sir Douglas Mawson's Marvelous Views of the Frozen South,

1915). For all of these programmes, lecturers stood by the screen and delivered their talk.

They had generally participated in the events and expeditions, or at least were

eyewitnesses or acknowledged experts, and so they shared their personal understanding or

insights with the audience. Often several prints of a given title would be in circulation at

the same time, with each lecturer's personalized narration varying considerably.

Frequently a programme would initially be presented by the chief filmmaker or even the

expedition head; then lesser figures would gradually take over these responsibilities.

While often shot in exotic locales, these programmes always featured the adventures of

Europeans or European Americans. In a remark about popular fiction that is equally

applicable to the documentary Stuart Hall ( 1981) has observed, 'In this period, the very

idea of adventure became synonymous with the demonstration of the moral, social and

physical mastery of the colonisers over the colonised.'

Non-fiction film played a crucial role as propaganda during the First World War, although

governments and their top military officers at first barred cameramen from the front lines.

More or less rapidly they came to recognize that documentary materials could not only

inspire or reassure their own civilian populations but be shown in neutral countries, where

they could influence public opinion. In the United States fiction films depicting the war

were barred because they violated America's claims to neutrality, but documentaries were

seen as informational, and were allowed to be shown. Films made by the belligerent

nations and screened in the United States included Britain Prepared (US title: How Britain

Prepared; Charles Urban, 1915), Somewhere in France (French government, 1915),

Deutschwehr War Films (Germany, 1915). These 'official war films' served as precedents

for documentaries such as America's Answer ( 1918) and Pershing Crusaders ( 1918),

which were produced by the Committee on Public Information, a section in the United

States government headed by George Creel, when the United States finally entered the

conflict in April 1917. Shown in a wide range of situations, these feature-length films

generally relied on intertitles rather than a lecturer -- though someone associated with the

sponsoring organization commonly introduced each screening. Documentaries of this

kind continued being made and screened throughout the war, and beyond, including

Alexandre Devarennes's La Femme française pendant la guerre ('The Frenchwoman

during the War', 1918), Percy Nash's Women Who Win (GB, 1919), and Bruce Woolf 's

The Battle of Jutland (GB, 1920).

FROM 'ILLUSTRATED LECTURE' TO 'DOCUMENTARY'

After the war, illustrated lectures continued to be widespread, but many were eventually

turned into straight documentaries with intertitles replacing the lecturer. Former President

Theodore Roosevelt had given a slidefilm lecture, The Exploration of a Great River, in

late 1914.

and in 1918 this material was given a more general release as Colonel Theodore

Roosevelt's Expedition into the Wilds. Martin E. Johnson, who had begun his career

giving illustrated lectures, released his documentary Among the Cannibal Isles of the

South Pacific ( 1918), which played S. F. Rothapfel's Tivoli Theater. Robert Flaherty had

filmed the Inuit of northern Canada between 1914 and 1916 and subsequently used this

material in an illustrated lecture The Eskimo ( 1916). When the possibility of turning it

into an intertitled documentary was lost when the negative went up in flames, Flaherty,

with sponsorship from the French furriers Revillon Frères, returned to northern Canada

and filmed Nanook of the North ( 1922).

Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North ( 1922)

The term 'illustrated lecture' had obviously become an inadequate label for the many non-

fiction films that were being distributed and shown with intertitles rather than live

narration. But critics and film-makers initially applied the term 'documentary' to those

programmes that displayed a marked cultural shift, rather than simply to all non-fiction

programmes that embraced a shift in production and representational practices. The

illustrated lecture typically took the western explorer or adventurer (who was often also

the presenter standing by the screen) as its hero. Nanook of the North switched its centre

of attention from the film-maker to Nanook and his Inuit family. To be sure, Flaherty was

guilty of romanticization and salvage anthropology (western influence was effaced as the

Eskimos were dressed in traditional clothing they no longer used). The Eskimos he

depicted as naïve primitives mystified by a simple record player actually fixed his

camera, developed his film, and actively participated in the film-making process.

Nanook is a highly contradictory film: it exhibits strong elements of participatory film-

making that has been celebrated by innovative and progressive film-makers of the present

day. In many respects it was an inter-cultural collaboration, but a collaboration between

two men for whom the daily life of women is of marginal interest. The desperate search

for food, synonymous with male hunting activities, provides the most elaborate scenes,

which are woven throughout the film. Confining the film-maker's voice to the intertitles

and keeping him behind the camera made the film appear more 'objective' than earlier

practices, even though the film-maker had, in fact, become more assertive in shaping his

materials. In many respects Nanook appropriated the techniques of Hollywood fiction

film-making, operating on the borderline between fiction and documentary, and turning

ethnographic observations into a narrativized romance. Flaherty constructs an idealized

Inuit family and gives us a star (Allakariallak both 'plays' and 'is' Nanook -- an attractive

personality the equal of Douglas Fairbanks) and a drama (man versus nature). Despite this

evident fictionalization, however, its long-take style was subsequently applauded by

André Bazin for the respect Flaherty gave to his subject and phenomenological reality.

The transformation of the adventure-travel film is inscribed within Grass ( 1925), made

by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The documentary starts out by focusing

on the film-makers, but then shifts its attention to the Bakhtiari people as they struggled

to cross the rugged mountains and Karun River of south-western Persia ( Iran) during

their annual migration. Despite the shift that Nanook and Grass represented, conventional

travel films, with the white men as protagonists, continued to be made throughout the

1920s.

For his second feature-length documentary, Moana ( 1926, shot on the South Sea island of

Samoa), Robert Flaherty kept his small American crew behind the camera. To provide the

necessary drama in a land where survival was easy, Flaherty induced the local inhabitants

to revive the ritual of tattooing-a male puberty rite. Less participatory and more

opportunistic as film-making than Nanook of the North, Moana also lacked a comparable

success at the box-office.

Cooper and Schoedsack followed Grass with Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness ( 1927),

a story of a farmer and his family's struggle to survive at the end of a jungle in Siam

( Thailand). Here the documentary impulse gave way to Hollywood story-telling, pointing

towards the filmmakers' later success King Kong ( 1933).

THE CITY SYMPHONY FILM

The shift in cultural outlook associated with documentary is also evident in the cycle of

city symphony films, which, beginning with Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhatta (

1921), took a modernist look at metropolitan life. Manhatta rejected the assumptions of

social reform photography and cinematography as well as the touristic vision that had

previously dominated depictions of the city. The film focuses on the business district of

Lower Manhattan, ignoring city landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and Grant's

Tomb. Human bodies are dwarfed by the area's skyscrapers, and many scenes were shot

from the tops of buildings, emphasizing the sense of abstract patterning produced by

modern architecture. Manhatta conveys the sense of scale and impersonality experienced

by city dwellers. The film loosely follows the course of a single day (starting with

commuters leaving the Staten Island Ferry for work and ending with a sunset), a structural

form that became characteristic of the city film. The film enjoyed little attention in the

United States but was more widely shown in Europe, where it may have encouraged

Alberto Cavalcanti to make Rien que les heures ('Only the hours', 1926) and Walter

Ruttmann to undertake Berlin: Symphony of a City.

Rien que les heures focuses on cosmopolitan Paris, often contrasting rich and poor even

as it combines non-fiction sequences with short staged or fictional vignettes. Berlin, shot

by Karl Freund, expresses a profound ambivalence toward the city that is consistent with

the ideas articulated by the influential Berlin sociologist Georg Simmel ( 1858-1918), in

such writings as 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' ( 1902). From the film's opening

sequence, in which a train races through the quiet countryside into the metropolitan

centre, city life produces an intensification of nervous stimuli. The film depicts a suicide:

a woman is overwhelmed (her desperation depicted in the film's only close-up) and jumps

off a bridge into the water. Yet no one in the crowd of casual spectators tries to rescue her.

Urban life is shown to require exactness and minute precision, evident in the depiction of

certain production processes as well as the way work halts abruptly at noon. As the

absence of close-ups emphasizes, all this coalesces 'into a structure of the highest

impersonality'.

Walking advertisements for stomach salts in Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a City ( 1927)

Berlin: Symphony of a City refuses either to humanize the city or to respect its

geographic integrity. Yet Ruttmann's organization of shots and abstract images also

emphasizes a heightened subjectivity made possible by urban culture. This tension is

evident in the film's English title: ' Berlin' -a concrete, impersonal designation -- and

'Symphony of a City', which asks the spectator to view the film abstractly and

metaphorically. As with Simmel, Ruttmann's dialectics underscore the contradictions of

city life. The city allows unprecedented freedom and this freedom 'allows the noble

substance common to all to come to the fore', but the city also requires a specialization,

which means 'death to the personality of the individual'. On one hand there is the mass --

suggested by shots of feet and the intercutting of soldiers and cattle. On the other there are

the people who try to assert their individuality by dressing in highly eccentric clothing. As

the film's almost relentless cataloguing of urban activities suggests, the personality of the

individual cannot readily maintain itself under the assault of city life. The city is where

money reigns and money is the leveller, expressing qualitative differences in the term

'how much?' The film thus does not emphasize class distinctions; if they are sometimes

apparent, it is only to suggest how eating and drinking (the oldest and intellectually most

negligible activity) can form a bond among heterogeneous people.

Many short city symphony films were made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Joris Ivens

made The Bridge ( De brug, 1928), a meticulous portrait of a Rotterdam railway bridge

that opened and closed so ships could travel the Maas River. Influenced by a machine

aesthetic, Ivens saw his subject as 'a laboratory of movements, tones, shapes, contrasts,

rhythms and the relationship between all of these'. His film Rain ( Regen, 1929) is a film

poem that traces the beginning, progress, and end of a rain shower in Amsterdam. Henri

Storck's Images d'Ostende ( 1930), Lészlo Moholy Nagy 's Berliner Stillleben ('Berlin still

life', 1929), Jean Vigo's À propos de Nice (About Nice', 1930), Irving Browning's City of

Contrasts ( 1931), and Jay Leyda's A Bronx Morning ( 1931) all functioned within the

genre. In contrast to Berlin, Leyda's film begins with an underground train leaving (rather

than entering) the central city for one of New York's outer boroughs. Once in the Bronx,

Leyda captures an array of quotidian activities (children's street games, vegetable sellers,

and mothers with prams) that counter Ruttmann's views of the city. Mikhail Kaufman

made a city symphony film in the Soviet Union, Moscow ( Moskva, 1927), but a more

important and internationally renowned one was made by his brother Denis Kaufman,

known as Dziga. Vertov. Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera ( Chelovek s

kinoapparatom, 1929) is a city symphony film that fuses a futurist aesthetic with

Marxism. The cameraman and his team help to create a new Soviet world. This is

literalized on the screen by the building up of an imaginary, artificial city through the

juxtaposition of sites and scenes taken in different locations. Alcoholism, capitalism (via

the New Economic Policy), and other pre-revolutionary problems are shown to persist

next to more positive developments. The cinema's role is to show these truths to the new

Soviet citizen and so bring about understanding and action. The Man with the Movie

Camera thus constantly draws attention to the processes of cinema -- film-making,

editing, exhibiting, and film-going. In this regard, Vertov's film is a manifesto for the

documentary film and a condemnation of the fiction feature film that Vertov railed against

in his various manifestos and writings.

DOCUMENTARY IN THE SOVIET UNION

Although Vertov and others often felt that non-fiction films were unfairly marginalized in

the Soviet Union, thousands of workers' clubs provided a unique and unparalleled outlet

for documentaries. Moreover, the Soviet film industry produced numerous industrials and

short documentaries for these venues, such as Steel Path on the activities of the rail

workers' union and With Iron and Blood on the construction of a factory. Soviet

documentary as a whole also provided the most radical and systematic break with

previous non-fiction screen practices.

For Vertov, The Man with the Movie Camera was the culmination of a decade of work in

non-fiction film-making. He sought to build up a group of trained film-makers, whom he

referred to as the 'kinoks'. Their films celebrated electrification, industrialization, and the

achievements of workers through hard labour, and even in the early Kinopravda (Cine-

Truth, 1922-5) newsreels, subject matter and treatment reveal a modernist aesthetic.

Vertov's films grew more audacious and controversial as the decade progressed. In Stride,

Soviet! ( 1926), work processes are shown in reverse and bread and other products are

taken from bourgeois consumers and repossessed by those who made them.

A radically new ethnographic impulse can be found in certain Soviet documentaries of

this period. Turksib (Victor Turin, 1929) looks at the different, potentially complementary

lives of people in Turkestan and Siberia as a way to explain the need for a railroad linking

these two parts of the Soviet Union. The film then shows the planning and building of the

railway with a final exhortation to finish it more quickly. A similar narrative is evident in

Sol Svanetii ('Salt for Svanetia', 1930), based on an outline by Sergei Tretaykov and made

by Mikhail Kalatozov in the Caucasus. The film engages in a kind of salvage

anthropology but not, as was the case for Flaherty, for purposes of romanticization.

Religion, custom, and traditional power relations are shown to be oppressive, blocking

even the simplest improvements in people's lives. Among their many problems, the

people and animals of Svanetia suffer from a lack of salt. After depicting the problem, the

film offers a solution: roads. The point was easy for relatively unsophisticated viewers to

grasp, but the increasing pressures of Stalinism are palpable in the film's hysterical

enthusiasm and its reductive solutions. Significantly, the Svanetians do not experience an

awakening of revolutionary consciousness -- it is the State that recognizes the problem

and determines the solution.

Another genre to which the Soviets made important contributions was the historical

documentary, a genre that relied heavily on the compilation of previously shot footage.

The most accomplished maker of compilation documentaries was Esfir Shub, a former

editor of fiction films. Her impressive panorama of Russian history consisted of three

feature-length productions: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty ( Padeniye dinasti

Romanovikh, 1927), which covered the period from 1912 to 1917; The Great Road

( Veliky put, 1928), about the first ten years of the Revolution ( 191727); and The Russia of

Nikolai II and Lev Tolstoy ( Rossiya Nikolaya II i Lev Tolstoy, 1928), made for the

centennial of Tolstoy's birth and using film from the 1897-1912 era. The Fall of the

Romanov Dynasty displays a Marxist analysis attuned to the social and economic

conditions that culminated in the First World War and the overthrow of the Tsar. Through

the powerful juxtapositions of images, it initially explicates the functionings of a

profoundly conservative society by examining class relations (landowning gentry and

peasants, capitalists and workers), the role of the State (the military, subservient

politicians in the Duma, appointed governors and administrative personnel, with Tsar

Nikolai perched at the top), and the mystifying role of the Russian Orthodox Church. The

international struggle for markets unleashes the forces of war leading to devastating

slaughter, and ultimately to the February 1917 Revolution that brought Alexander

Kerensky to power. The images are often striking in their composition or subject-matter,

but Shub's framework attaches significance to even the most clichéd scenes, such as

marching soldiers.

POLITICAL DOCUMENTARY IN THE WEST

Non-fiction film-making of an overtly political nature also went on in the United States

and western Europe after the First World War. Short news and information films on

strikes and related activities were made by unions and leftist political parties in many

countries. In the United States, Communist activist Alfred Wagenknecht produced The

Passaic Textile Strike ( 1926), a short feature that combined documentary scenes with

studio re-enactments, while the American Federation of Labor produced Labor's Reward (

1925). In Germany, Prometheus, formed by Willi Münzenberg, produced such

documentaries as The Document of Shanghai ( Das Dokument von Shanghai, 1928),

which focused on the March 1927 revolutionary uprisings in China. The German

Communist Party subsequently produced a number of short documentaries, including

Slatan Dudow's Zeitproblem: wie der Arbeiter wohnt ('Contemporary problem: how the

worker lives', 1930). Large corporations, right-wing organizations, and government also

used non-fiction film for purposes of propaganda.

In contrast to these breaks with pre- First World War non-fiction screen practices, the new

documentary appeared late in Britain, and in a modest form -- John Gri erson 's Drifters

( 1929), a fifty-eight-minute silent documentary about the fishing process. It focuses on a

fishing boat that drifts for herring, and the people who pull in the nets and pack the fish in

barrels for market. It combines a Flaherty-style plot of man versus nature with partially

abstracted close-ups and a rhythmic editing pattern learned from careful scrutiny of

Eisenstein's Potemkin ( 1925). As Ian Aitken has remarked, Grierson was seeking to

express a reality that transcended specific issues of exploitation and economic hardship.

Nevertheless, Grierson relegated the people who did the actual work to his film's

periphery, even as he synthesized the familiar narrative of a production process with

modernist aesthetics. The film enjoyed a strong critical success, suggesting the extent to

which the British documentary had lost its way in the years since the First World War, but

also the potential for renewal in the 1930s and beyond.

During the 1920s, documentary film-makers struggled either at the margins of

commercial cinema or outside it altogether. Despite the comparatively inexpensive nature

of documentary production, even the most successful films did little more than return

their costs. The general absence of profit motive meant that documentarians had other

reasons for film-making, and often had to rely on sponsorship (as Flaherty did with

Nanook), or self-financing. Although conventional travelogues had a long-standing niche

in the market-place, outside the Soviet Union there was little or no formal or institutional

framework to support more innovative efforts at production.

Despite their low returns, in the industrialized nations non-fiction programmes were

shown in a wide range of venues. In the United States, films such as Nanook of the North,

Berlin: Symphony of a City, and The Man with the Movie Camera enjoyed regular

showings at motion picture theatres in a few large cities and so were reviewed by

newspaper critics, with varying degrees of perspicacity ( Berlin was considered to be a

disappointing travelogue by New York critics). Films such as Manhatta were sometimes

shown as shorts within the framework of mainstream cinema's balanced programmes, and

avant-garde documentaries were often shown at art galleries. In Europe, the network of

ciné clubs provided an outlet for many artistically and politically radical documentaries.

Cultural institutions and political organizations of all types screened (and occasionally

sponsored) documentaries as well. Even in the Soviet Union, prominent documentaries

quickly departed town-centre theatres for extended runs at workers' clubs. Because most

non-fiction programmes generally had some kind of educational or informational value,

they penetrated into all aspects of social life and were shown in the church, the union hall,

the school, and cultural institutions like the Museum of Natural History ( New York). By

the end of the 1920s, then, documentary was a broadly diffused if financially precarious

phenomenon, characterized by its diversity of production and exhibition circumstances.

Bibliography

Aitken, Ian ( 1990), Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentaty Film

Movement.

Barnouw, Erik ( 1974), Documentaty.

Brownlow, Kevin ( 1979), The War, the West and the Wilderness.

Calder-Marshall, Arthur ( 1963), The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert J. Flaherty.

Cooper, Merian C. ( 1925), Grass.

Flaherty, Robert J. ( 1924), My Eskimo Friends.

Hall, Stuart ( 1981), The Whites of their Eyes.

Holm, Bill, and Quimby, George Irving ( 1980), Edward S. Curtis in the Land of the War

Canoes.

Jacobs, Lewis (ed.) ( 1979), The Documentary Tradition.

Musser, Charles, with Nelson, Carol ( 1991), High-Gass Moving Pictures: Lyman H.

Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880-1920.

Vertov, Dziga ( 1984), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov.

Dziga Vertov (1896-1954)

Denis Arkadevich ( David Abramovich) Kaufman, later to become famous under the

name Dziga Vertov, was born in Bialystok (now in Poland), where his father was a

librarian. His younger brothers both became cameramen: Mikhail (born 1897) worked

with Vertov until 1929, while the youngest, Boris (born 1906) emigrated first to France

(where he shot Jean Vigo's films) and then to America (where he won an Academy Award

for On the Waterfront).

Starting his career with the conventional newsreel Kino-Nedelia ('Film-Weekly', 1918-

19), Vertov rapidly absorbed ideas shared by left-wing and Constructivist artists

( Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Varvara Stepanova) and Proletkult theorists

( Alexander Bogdanov, Alexei Gan). The documentary and non- or antifictional character

of his cinema was conceptualized in the context of the 'mortification of art' in the future

proletarian culture, and the 'kinoki' (cine-eye) group, with Kaufman, Vertov, and his

(second) wife Elizaveta Svilova as its core, saw themselves as the Moscow headquarters

of a national network (which never materialized) of local cine-amateurs providing

continuous flow of newsreel footage. Later the network was supposed to be supplemented

by a 'radio-ear' component to finally merge into the 'radio-eye', a global TV of the future

socialist world with no place for fictional stories. Vertov's crusade against the fiction film

was intensified after 1922 when Lenin's New Economic Policy led to an increase in

fiction film imports, but he was equally scathing about the new Soviet cinema of

Kuleshov and Eisenstein, describing it as 'the same old crap tinted red'.

The polar tenets of Vertov's theory were 'life caught unawares' and 'the Communist

deciphering of reality'. The 'kinoki' worked on two series of newsreels at the same time:

Kino-pravda ('Cine-truth') grouped facts in a political perspective, while the more

informal Goskinokalendar ('State film calendar') arranged them in a casual home-movie

style. Gradually the orator in Vertov took the upper hand: between 1924 and 1929 the

style of his feature-length drifted from the diary style towards 'pathos', while Kino-glaz

('Cine-eye', 1924) foregrounded singular events and individual figures. In accordance

with the trend at the time towards the monumental, Shagai, Soviet! ('Stride, Soviet!',

1926) was conceived as a 'symphony of work', and the poster-style The Eleventh Year

( 1928) as a 'hymn' celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution.

Despite the self-effacing 'we' of the manifestos, the film practice of the 'kinoki' was

largely defined by Vertov's own highly individual amalgam of interests in music, poetry,

and science. Four years of music lessons followed by a year of studies at the Institute of

Neuropsychology in Petrograd ( 1916) led him to create what he later called the

'laboratory of hearing'. Inspired by the Italian Futurist Manifestos (published in Russia in

1914) and the trans-sense poetry ( zaum) practised by Russian and Italian futurist poets,

Vertov's acoustic experiments ranged from mixing fragments of stenographically

registered speech and gramophone records to verbal rendering of environmental noises

such as the sound of a saw-mill. After 1917, the futurist cult of noises was given a

revolutionary tinge by Proletkult as part of the 'art of production', and urban cacophonies

remained significant for Vertov throughout the 20s. He took part in the citywide

'symphony of factory whistles' (with additional sound effects of machine-guns, marine

cannons, and hydroplanes) staged in Baku in 1922, and his first sound film, Enthusiasm

( 1930) employed a similar noise symphony for its soundtrack.

No less important was his suppressed passion for poetry. All his life Vertov wrote poetry

(never published) in the style of Walt Whitman and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and in his

films of 1926-28 Vertov the poet emerges through profuse titling, particularly convoluted

in One Sixth of the World ( 1926) with its editing controlled by Whitmanesque intertitles:

'You who eat the meat of reindeer [image] Dipping it into warm blood [image] You

sucking on your mother's breast [image] And you, highspirited hundred-years-old man',

etc. While some critics declared that such editing inaugurated a new genre of 'poetic

cinema' ( Viktor Shklovsky went so far as to see in the film traditional forms of the

'triolet'), others found it inconsistent with the LEF (Left Front) doctrine of 'cinema of

facts' to which the 'kinoki' formally subscribed.

Original poster for The Man with the Movie Camera ( 1929)

In response to these Criticisms, Vertov ruled out the use of all intertitles from his filmic

manifesto The Man with the Movie Camera ( Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929), a tour de

force which results in what appears to be the most 'theoretical' film of the silent era self-

confined to the image alone. Documentary in material but utopian in essence (its setting

was a nowhere city, a composite location of bits of Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and a coal-

mining region of the Ukraine), The Man with the Movie Camera summarized the thematic

universe of the 'kinoki' movement: the image of the worker perfect as the machine, that of

the film-maker as socially useful as the factory worker, together with that of the super-

sensitive spectator reacting to no matter how complicated a message the film offers to his

or her attention. In 1929, however, all these quixotic images were hopelessly out of date --

including the master image of the film, that of the ideal city in which private life and the

life of the community are harmonized and controlled by the infallible eye of the movie

camera.More personal in style but less original in imagery, Vertov's post-'kinoki' films of

the sound period revolved around songs and music, images of women, and cult figures,

past and present. In Lullaby ( 1937) liberated women sing praise to Stalin, much in the

spirit of the earlier Three Songs of Lenin ( 1934), while Three Heroines ( 1938) shows

women mastering 'male' professions as engineer, piolot, and military officer. These three

films stem back to a project of 1933 carrying the generic title 'She', a film that was

supposed to 'race the working of the brain' of a fictional composer as he writes an

eponymous symphony of womanhood across the ages.Under Stalin, Vertov's feature-

length documentaries were largely suppressed: although never arrested, he was

blacklisted during the anti-Semitic campaign of 1949. He died of cancer on 12 February

1954.

YURI TSIVIAN SELECT FILMOGRAPHY Kinonedelia ( 1918-19); Boi pod

Tsaritsynym ('The Battle of Tsaritsyn'); Istoriya grazdanskoi voiny ('History of the Civil

War') ( 1921); Kino-Pravda ( 1922-25); Goskinokalendar ( 1923-25); Kino-glas ( 1924);

Shagai, Soviet! ('Stride, Soviet!') ( 1926); Shestaya chast sveta (One Sixth of the World)

( 1926); Odinnadsatyi (The Eleventh Year) ( 1928); Chelovek s Kinoapparatom (The Man

with the Movie Camera) ( 1929); Entuziazm -- simfoniya Donbassa (Enthusiasm --

Symphony of the Donbas) ( 1930); Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs of Lenin) ( 1934);

Kolybelnaya ('Lullaby') ( 1937); Sergo Ordzonikidze ( 1937); Tri geroini (Three Heroines)

( 1938); Tebe, front ('To you, front') ( 1941); Novosti dnia ('News of the day'; separate

issues) ( 1944-54)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Feldman, Seth ( 1979), Dziga Vertov: a guide to references and resources.

Petric, Vlada ( 1987), Constructivism in Film.

Vertov, Dziga ( 1984), Kino-eye.

Cinema and the Avant-Garde

A. L. REES

Modern art and silent cinema were born simultaneously. In 1895 Cézanne's paintings

were seen in public for the first time in twenty years. Largely scorned, they also

stimulated artists to the revolution in art that took place between 1907 and 1912, just as

popular film was also entering a new phase of development. Crossing the rising barriers

between art and public taste, painters and other modernists were among the first

enthusiasts for American adventure movies, Chaplin, and cartoons, finding in them a

shared taste for modern city life, surprise, and change. While the influential philosopher

Henri Bergson criticized cinema for falsely eliding the passage of time, his vivid

metaphors echo and define modernism's attitude to the visual image: 'form is only the

snapshot view of a transition.'

New theories of time and perception in art, as well as the popularity of cinema, led artists

to try to put 'paintings in motion' through the film medium. On the eve of the First World

War, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, author of The Cubist Painters ( 1913), explained the

animation process in his journal Les Soirées de Paris and enthusiastically compared Le

Rythme coloré ('Colour rhythms', 1912-14), an abstract film planned by the painter

Léopold Survage, to 'fireworks, fountains and electric signs'. In 1918 the young Louis

Aragon wrote in Louis Delluc's Le Film that cinema must have 'a place in the avant-

garde's preoccupations.

They have designers, painters, sculptors. Appeal must be made to them if one wants to

bring some purity to the art of movement and light.'

The call for purity -- an autonomous art free of illustration and story-telling -- had been

the cubists' clarion-cry since their first public exhibition in 1907, but the search for 'pure'

or 'absolute' film was made problematic by the hybrid nature of the film medium, praised

by Méliès in the same year as 'the most enticing of all the arts, for it makes use of almost

all of them'. But for modernism, cinema's turn to dramatic realism, melodrama, and epic

fantasy was questioned, in terms reminiscent of the classical aesthetics of Lessing, as a

confusion of literary and pictorial values. As commercial cinema approached the

condition of synaesthesia with the aid of sound and toned or tinted colour, echoing in

popular form the 'total work of art' of Wagnerianism and art nouveau, modernism looked

towards non-narrative directions in film form.

ART CINEMA AND THE EARLY AVANT-GARDE

The early avant-garde followed two basic routes. One invoked the neo-impressionists'

claim that a painting, before all else, is a flat surface covered with colour; similarly, the

avant-garde implied, a film was a strip of transparent material that ran through a projector.

This issue was debated among the cubists around 1912, and opened the way to

abstraction. Survage's designs for his abstract film were preceded by the experiments of

the futurist brothers Ginna and Corra, who hand-painted raw film as early as 1910 (a

technique rediscovered in the 1930s by Len Lye and Norman McLaren). Abstract

animation also dominated the German avant-garde 1919-25, stripping the image to pure

graphic form, but ironically also nurturing a modernist variant of synaesthesia, purging

the screen of overt human action while developing rhythmic interaction of basic symbols

(square, circle, triangle) in which music replaces narrative as a master code. An early

vision of 'Plastic Art in Motion' is found in Ricciotto Canu do 's 1911 essay The Birth of a

Sixth Art, an inspired if volatile amalgam of Nietzsche, high drama, and futurist machine

dynamism.

A second direction led artists to burlesque or parody films which drew on the primitive

narrative mainstream, before (as many modernists believed) it was sullied by realism. At

the same time, these films are documents of the art movements which gave rise to them,

with roles played by -- among others -- Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie, and

Francis Picabia ( Entr'acte, 'Interlude', 1924), and Eisenstein, Len Lye, and Hans Richter (

Everyday, 1929). The ironic humour of modernism was expressed in such films (some

now lost) as Vita Futurista ( 1916), its Russian counterpart Drama of the Futurist Cabaret

( 1913), its successors in Glumov's Diary ( Eisenstein, 1923) and Mayakovsky's

comicGuignol films, and such later elaborations of cultural slapstick as Clair's classic

Entr'acte ( 1924) and Hans Richter's dark comedy Ghosts before Noon ( 1928). This genre

was explored mostly in the Dada and surrealist tradition, which valued dream-like 'trans-

sense' irrationality as the key trope of film montage and camera image.

An alternative route to the cinema as an art form (the specific meaning of which overrides

the general sense in which all cinema is an art) ran parallel to the artists' avantgarde from

c. 1912 to 1930 and sometimes overlapped with it. The art cinema or narrative avant-

garde included such movements as German Expressionism, the Soviet montage school,

the French 'impressionists' Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac, and independent directors

such as Abel Gance, F. W. Murnau, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. Like the artist-film-makers,

they resisted the commercial film in favour of a cultural cinema to equal the other arts in

seriousness and depth. In the silent era, with few language barriers, these highly visual

films had as international an audience as the Hollywood-led mainstream they opposed.

Film clubs from Paris to London and Berlin made up a non-commercial screening circuit

for films which were publicized in radical art journals ( G, De stijl) and specialist

magazines ( Close-Up, Film Art, Experimental Film). Conference and festival screenings

-- pioneered by trade shows and expositions such as the 1929 'Film und Foto' in Stuttgart

-- also sometimes commissioned new experimental films, as in the light-play,

chronophotography, and Fritz Lang clips of Kipho ( 1925, promoting a 'kine-foto' fair) by

the veteran cameraman Guido Seeber. Political unions of artists like the November Group

in Weimar Germany also supported the new film, and French cinéclubs tried to raise

independent production funds from screenings and rentals.

For the first decade there were few firm lines drawn by enthusiasts for the 'artistic film' in

a cluster of ciné-clubs, journals, discussion groups, and festivals, as they evenhandedly

promoted all kinds of film experiment as well as minor, overlooked genres such as

scientific films and cartoons which were similarly an alternative to the commercial fiction

cinema. Many key figures crossed the divide between the narrative and poetic avant-

gardes; Jean Vigo, Luis Buñuel, Germaine Dulac, Dziga Vertov, and Kenneth McPherson

of the aptly named Borderline ( 1930-starring the poet H.D., the novelist Bryher, and Paul

Robeson).

The idea of the avant-garde or 'art film' in Europe and the USA linked the many factions

opposed to mass cinema. At the same time, the rise of narrative, psychological realism in

the maturing art cinema led to its gradual split from the anti-narrative artists' avant-garde,

whose 'cinepoems' were closer to painting and sculpture than to the tradition of radical

drama.

Nowhere was this more dramatically the case than in a series of Chinese-style scroll-

drawings made in Swit zerland by the Swedish artist and dadaist Viking Eggeling in

1916-17. These sequential experiments began as investigations of the links between

musical and pictorial harmony, an analogy Eggeling pursued in collaboration with fellow

dadaist Hans Richter from 1918, leading to their first attempts to film their work in

Germany around 1920. Eggeling died in 1925 shortly after completing his Diagonal

Symphony, a unique dissection of delicate and almost art deco tones and lines, its

intuitive rationalism shaped by cubist art, Bergson's philosophy of duration, and

Kandinsky's theory of synaesthesia. It was premièred in a famous November Group

presentation ( Berlin, 1925) of abstract films by cubist, Dada, and Bauhaus artists: Hans

Richter, Walter Ruttmann, Fernand Léger, René Clair, and (with a 'light-play' projection

work) Hirschfeld-Mack.

Marcel Duchamp's Anémic cinéma

The division between the narrative and poetic avantgardes was never absolute, as seen in

the careers of Bufiuel, Vigo (especially in the two experimental documentaries Taris

( 1931), with its slowing of time and underwater shots, and the carnivalesque but also

political film À propos de Nice (About Nice', 1930)), and even Vertov, whose Enthusiasm

( 1930) reinvokes the futurist idea of 'noise-music', has no commentary, and is

unashamedly non-naturalistic despite its intended celebration of the Soviet Five-Year

Plan.

Artists' films were underpinned by the flourishing of futurist, constructivist, and dadaist

groups between 1909 and the mid-1920s. This 'vortex' of activity, to use Ezra Pound's

phrase, included the experiments in 'light-play' at the Bauhaus, Robert and Sonya

Delaunay's 'orphic cubism', Russian 'Rayonnisme' and the cubo-futurism of Severini and

Kupka, and its Russian variants in the 'Lef' group. In turn, all of these experiments were,

at least in part, rooted in the cubist revolution pioneered by Braque and Picasso from

1907 to 1912. Cubism was an art of fragments, at first depicting objects from a sequence

of shifting angles or assembling images by a collage of paper, print, paint, and other

materials. It was quickly seen as an emblem of its time-Apollinaire in 1912 was perhaps

the first to evoke an analogy between the new painting and the new physics -- but also as

a catalyst for innovation in other art forms, especially in design and architecture. The

language of visual fragmentation was called by the Fauve painter Derain ( Eggeling's

mentor) in 1905 the art of 'deliberate disharmonies' and it parallels the growing use of

dissonance in literature (Joyce, Stein) and music ( Stravinsky, Schoenberg).

CUBISM

While cubism sought a pictorial equivalent for the newly discovered instability of vision,

the cinema was moving rapidly in the opposite direction. Far from abandoning narrative,

it was encoding it. The 'primitive' sketches of 1895-1905 films were succeeded by a new

and more confidently realist handling of screen space and film acting. Subject-matter was

expanded, plot and motivation were clarified through the fate of individuals. Most

crucially, and in contrast to cubism's display of artifice, the new narrative cinema

smoothed the traces of change in shot, angle of vision, and action by the erasure effect of

'invisible editing' to construct a continuous, imaginary flow.

Nevertheless cubism and cinema are clearly enough products of the same age and within

a few years they were mutually to influence each other: Eisenstein derived the concept of

montage as much from cubist collage as from the films of Griffith and Porter. At the same

time, they face in opposite directions. Modern art was trying to expunge the literacy and

visual values which cinema was equally eager to incorporate and exploit (partly to

improve its respectability and partly to expand its very language).

These values were the basis of academic realism in painting, for example, which the early

modernists had rejected: a unified visual field, a central human theme, emotional

identification or empathy, illusionist surface.

Cubism heralded the broad modernism which welcomed technology and the mass age,

and its openly hermetic aspects were tempered by combining painterly purism with motifs

from street life and materials used by artisans. At the same time, cubism shared with later

European modernism a resistance to many cultural values embodied in its own favourite

image of the new-the cinema, dominated then as now by Hollywood. While painters and

designers could be fairly relaxed in their use of Americana, because independent at this

time of its direct influence, the films of the post-cubist avant-garde are noticeably anti-

Hollywood in form, style, and production.

The avant-garde films influenced by cubism therefore joined with the European art

cinema and social documentary as points of defence against market domination by the

USA, each attempting to construct a model of film culture outside the categories of

entertainment and the codes of fiction. Despite frequent eulogies of American cinema, of

which the surrealists became deliberately the most delirious readers (lamenting the

growing power of illusionism as film 'improved'), few surviving avant-garde films

resemble these icons. Only slapstick, as in Entr'acte ( 1924), was directly copied from the

American example, but this has its roots tangled with Méliès.

ABSTRACTION

The abstract films of Richter, Ruttmann, and Fischinger were based on the concept of

painting with motion, but also aspired towards the visual music implied in such titles as

Richter's Rhythmus series ( 1921-4) and Ruttmann's Opus I-TV ( 1921-5). This wing of

the avant-garde was strongly idealist, and saw in film the utopian goal of a universal

language of pure form, supported by the synaesthetic ideas expressed in Kandinsky's On

the Spiritual in Art, which sought correspondences between the arts and the senses. In

such key works as Circles ( 1932) and Motion Painting ( 1947), Fischinger, the most

popular and influential of the group, tellingly synchronized colour rhythms to the music

of Wagner and Bach.

Fischinger alone pursued abstract animation throughout his career, which ended in the

USA. Other German film-makers turned away from this genre after the mid1920s, partly

because of economic pressure (there was minimal industrial support for the non-

commercial abstract cinema). Richter made lyric collages such as Filmstudie ( 1926),

mixing abstract and figurative shots in which superimposed floating eyeballs act as a

metaphor for the viewer adrift in film space. His later films pioneer the surrealist

psychodrama. Ruttmann became a documentarist with Berlin: Symphony of a City in

1927 and later worked on state-sponsored features and documentaries, including Leni

Riefenstahl's Olympia ( 1938).

SURREALISM

In France, some film-makers, such as Henri Chomette (René Clair's brother and author of

short 'cinema put' films), Delluc, and especially Germaine Dulac, were drawn to theories

of 'the union of all the senses', finding an analogue for harmony, counterpoint, and

dissonance in the visual structures of montage editing. But the surrealists rejected these

attempts to 'impose' order where they preferred to provoke contradiction and

discontinuity.

The major films of the surrealists turned away equally from the retinal vision of form in

movement-explored variously by the French 'impressionists', the rapid cutting of Gance

and L'Herbier, and the German avant-garde -towards a more optical and contestatory

cinema. Vision is made complex, connections between images are obscured, sense and

meaning are questioned. Man Ray's emblematic 1923 Dada film -- its title Le Retour à la

raison ('Return to reason') evoking the parody of the Enlightenment buried in the name

Cabaret Voltaire -- begins with photogrammed salt, pepper, tacks, and sawblades printed

on the film strip to assert film grain and surface. A fairground, shadows, the artist's studio,

and a mobile sculpture in double exposure evoke visual space. The film ends, after three

minutes, in a 'painterly' shot of a model filmed 'against the light', in positive and negative.

Exploring film as indexical photogram, iconic image, and symbolic pictorial code, its

Dada stamp is seen in its shape, which begins in flattened darkness and ends in the purely

cinematic image of a figure turning in 'negative' space.

Man Ray's later Étoile de mer ('Star of the sea', 1928), loosely based on a script by the

poet Robert Desnos, refuses the authority of the 'look' when a stippled lens adds opacity

to an oblique tale of doomed love, lightly sketched in with punning intertitles and shots (a

starfish attacked by scissors, a prison, a failed sexual encounter). Editing draws out the

disjunction between shots rather than their continuity, a technique pursued in Man Ray's

other films, which imply a 'cinema of refusal' in the evenly paced and seemingly random

sequences of Emak Bakia ( 1927) or repeated empty rooms in Les Mystères du Château

de Dés ('The mysteries of the Chateau de Dés', 1928). While surrealist cinema is often

understood as a search for the excessive and spectacular image (as in dream sequences

modelled on surrealist theory) the group were in fact drawn to find the marvellous in the

banal, which explains their fascination with Hollywood as well as their refusal to imitate

it.

Marcel Duchamp cerebrally evoked and subverted the abstract image in his ironically

titled Anémic cinéma ( 1926), an anti-retinal film in which slowly rotating spirals imply

sexual motifs, intercutting these 'pure' images with scabrous and near-indecipherable puns

that echo Joyce's current and likewise circular 'Work in Progress', Finnegans Wake. Less

reductively than Duchamp, Man Ray's films also oppose 'visual pleasure' and the viewer's

participation. Montage slows or repeats actions and objects (spirals, phrases, revolving

doors and cartwheels, hands, gestures, fetishes, light patterns) to frustrate narrative and

elude the viewer's full grasp of the fantasies film provokes. This austere but playful

strategy challenges the rule of the eye in fiction film and the sense of cinematic plenitude

it aims to construct.

Artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray playing chess in a scene from René Clair's Entr'acte ( 1924)

FROM ENTRACTE TO BLOOD OF A POET

Three major French films of the period -- Clair's Entr'acte ( 1924), Léger's Ballet

micanique ('Mechanical Ballet', 1924) and Buñuel's Un chien andalou (An Andalusian

dog', 1928) -celebrate montage editing while also subverting its use as rhythmic vehicle

for the all-seeing eye. In Entr'acte, the chase of a runaway hearse, a dizzying roller-

coaster ride, and the transformation of a ballerina into a bearded male in a tutu all create

visual jolts and enigmas, freed of narrative causality. Ballet mécanique rebuffs the

forward flow of linear time, its sense of smooth progression, by loop-printing a sequence

of a grinning washerwoman climbing steep stone steps, a Daumier-like contrast to

Duchamp's elegantly photo-cinematic painting Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912,

while the abstract shapes of machines are unusually slowed as well as speeded by

montage. Léger welcomed the film medium for its new vision of 'documentary facts'; his

late-cubist concept of the image as an objective sign is underlined by the film's

Chaplinesque titles and circular framing device-the film opens and closes by parodying

romantic fiction (Madame Léger sniffs a rose in slow motion). Marking off the film as an

object suspended between two moments of frozen time was later used by Cocteau in

Blood of a Poet ( Le Sang d'un poète, 1932), in this case shots of a falling chimney. The

abrupt style of these films evokes earlier, 'purer' cinema; farce in Entr'acte, Chaplin in

Ballet mécanique, and the primitive 'trick-film' in Blood of a Poet.

These and other avant-garde films all had music by modern composers -- Satie, Auric,

Honegger, Antheilexcept Un chien andalou, which was played to gramophone recordings

of Wagner and tangos. Few avant-garde films were shown silently, with the exception of

the austere Diagonal Symphony, for which Eggeling forbade sound. According to Richter

they were even shown to popular jazz. The influence of early film was added to a Dada

spirit of improvisation and admiration for the US cinema's moments of anti-naturalistic

excess. Contributors to a later high modernist aesthetic of which their makers -like

Picasso and Braque -- knew nothing at the time, these avant-garde films convey less an

aspiration to purity of form than a desire to transgress (or reshape) the notion of form

itself, theorized contemporaneously by Bataille in a dual critique of prose narrative and

idealist abstraction. Their titles refer beyond the film medium: Entr'acte ('Interlude') to

theatre (it was premièred 'between the acts' of a Satie ballet), Ballet mécanique to dance,

and Blood of a Poet to literature; only Un chien andalou remains the mysterious

exception.

The oblique title of Chien andalou asserts its independence and intransigence. Arguably

its major film and certainly its most influential, this stray dog of Surrealism was in fact

made before its young Spanish director joined the official movement. A razor slicing an

eye acts as an emblem for the attack on normative vision and the comfort of the spectator

whose surrogate screen-eye is here assaulted. Painterly abstraction is undermined by the

objective realism of the static, eye-level camera, while poetic-lyrical film is mocked by

furiously dislocated and mismatched cuts which fracture space and time, a postcubist

montage style which questions the certainty of seeing. The film is punctuated by craftily

inane intertitles to aim a further blow at the 'silent' cinema, mainstream or avant-garde, by

a reduction to absurdity.

The widely known if deliberately mysterious 'symbolism'of the film -- the hero's striped

fetishes, his yoke of priests, donkeys, and grand pianos, a woman's buttocks that dissolve

into breasts, the death's head moth and ants eating blood-for long dominated critical

discussion, but recent attention has turned to the structure of editing by which these

images are achieved. The film constructs irrational spaces from its rooms, stairways, and

streets, distorting temporal sequence, while its two male leads disconcertingly resemble

each other as their identities blur.

For most of its history, avant-gardes have produced the two kinds of film-making

discussed here; short, oblique films in the tradition of Man Ray, and the abstract German

films, which broadly set up a different space for viewing from narrative drama, in which

stable perception is interrupted and non-identification of subject and image are aimed for.

Chien andalou sets up another model, in which elements of narrative and acting arouse

the spectator's psychological participation in plot or scene while at the same time

distancing the viewer by disallowing empathy, meaning, and closure; an image of the

dissociated sensibility or 'double consciousness' praised by Surrealism in its critique of

naturalism.

Two further French films expand this strategy, which came with the sound film era and

the end of the first phase of avant-garde film-making before the rise of Hitler; L'Age d'or

('The golden age', 1930) and Blood of a Poet ( 1932). Almost feature length, these films

(privately funded by arts patron the Vicomte de Noailles as successive birthday presents

to his wife) link Cocteau's lucid classicism to Surrealism's baroque mythopoeia. Both

films ironize visual meaning in voice-over or by intertitles (made on the cusp of the sound

era, they use both spoken and written text). Cocteau's voice raspingly satirizes his Poet's

obsession with fame and death ('Those who smash statues should beware of becoming

one'), paralleled in the opening of L'Age d'or by an intertitle 'lecture' on scorpions and an

attack on Ancient and modern Rome. Bufiuel links the fall of the classical age to his main

target, Christianity (as when Christ and the disciples are seen leaving a chateau after a

Sadean orgy). The film itself celebrates 'mad love'. A text written by the surrealists and

signed by Aragon, Breton, Dalí, Éluard, Peret, Tzara and others was issued at the first

screening: L'Age d'or, 'uncorrupted by plausibility', reveals the 'bankruptcy of our

emotions, linked with the problem of capitalism'. The manifesto echoes Vigo's

endorsement of Un chien andalou's 'savage poetry' (also in 1930) as a film of 'social

consciousness'. 'An Andalusian dog howls,' wrote Vigo; 'who then is dead?'

Unlike Buñuel's film, Cocteau's is not overtly anti-theocratic, but even so his Poet-hero

encounters archaic art, magic and ritual, China, opium, and transvestism before dying in

front of an indifferent stage audience while he plays cards. Cocteau's film finally affirms

the redemptive classic tradition, but the dissolution of personal identity opposes the

western fixation on stability and repetition, asserting that any modern classicism was to

be determinedly 'neo'.

THE 1930s

Experimental sound-tracks and minimal synchronized speech in these films expanded the

call for a non-naturalistic sound cinema in Eisenstein's and Pudovkin's 1928 manifesto

and explored by Vertov's Enthusiasm ( 1930). This direction was soon blocked by the

popularity and realism of the commercial sound film. Rising costs of film-making and the

limited circulation of avant-garde films contributed to their decline. The broadly leftist

politics of the avant-garde -- both surrealists and abstract constructivists had complex

links to Communist and socialist organizations-were increasingly strained under two

reciprocal policies which dominated the 1930s; the growth of German nationalism under

Hitler from 1933 and the Popular Front opposition to Fascism which rose, under

Moscow's lead, a few years later. The attack on 'excessive' art and the avant-garde in

favour of popular 'realism' were soon to close down the international co-operation which

made possible German-Soviet co-productions like Piscator's formally experimental

montage film Revolt of the Fishermen ( 1935) or Richter's first feature film Metall

(abandoned in 1933 after the Nazi take-over). Radical Soviet film-makers as well as their

'cosmopolitan' allies abroad were forced into more normative directions.

The more politicized film-makers recognized this themselves in the second international

avant-garde conference held in Belgium in 1930. The first more famous congress in 1929

at La Sarraz, Switzerland, at which Eisenstein, Balàzs, Moussinac, Montagu, Cavalcanti,

Richter, and Ruttmann were present, had endorsed the need for aesthetic and formal

experiment as part of a still growing movement to turn 'enemies of the film today' into

'friends of the film tomorrow', as Richter's optimistic 1929 book affirmed. One year later

the stress was put emphatically on political activism, Richter's social imperative: 'The age

demands the documented fact,' he claimed.

The first result of this was to shift avant-garde activity more directly into documentary.

This genre, associated with political and social values, still encouraged experiment and

was ripe for development of sound and image montage to construct new meanings. In

addition, the documentary did not use actors; the final barrier between the avant-garde

and mainstream or art-house cinema.

The documentary -- usually used to expose social ills and (via state or corporate funding)

propose remedies -attracted many European experimental film-makers including Richter,

Ivens, and Henri Storck. In the United States, where there was a small but volatile

community of activists for the new film, alongside other modern developments in writing,

painting, and photography, the cause of a radical avant-garde was taken up by magazines

such as Experimental Film and seeped into the New Deal films made by Pare Lorentz and

Paul Strand (a modernist photographer since the age of Camerawork and New York

Dada).

In Europe, notably with John Grierson, Henri Storck, and Joris Ivens, new fusions

between experimental film and factual cinema were pioneered. Grierson's attempt to

equate corporate patronage with creative production led him most famously to the GPO,

celebrated as an emblem of modern social communications in the Auden -- Britten

montage section of Night Mail ( 1936), which ends with Grierson's voice intoning a night-

time hymn to Glasgow -'let them dream their dreams . . .'.

Alberto Cavalcanti and Len Lye were hired to open the documentary cinema to new ideas

and techniques. Lye's uncompromising career as a film-maker, almost always for state and

business patrons, showed the survival of sponsored funding for the arts in Europe and the

USA in the depression years. His cheap and cheerfully hand-made colour-experiments of

the period treat their overt subjects (parcel deliveries in the wholly abstract A Colour Box

( 1935), early posting in Trade Tattoo ( 1937) with a light touch; the films celebrate the

pleasures of pure colour and rhythmic sound-picture montage. The loss of both Grierson

and Lye to North America after the 1940s marked the end of this period of collaboration.

Germaine Dermoz as the bored wife in Germaine Dulac 's Smiling Madame Beudet ( La Souriante Madame Beudet, 1923)

HARMONY AND DISRUPTION

The now legendary conflict between director Germaine Dulac and poet Antonin Artaud,

over the making of The Seashell and the Clergyman ( La Coquille et le clergyman, 1927)

from his screenplay, focuses some key issues in avantgarde film. Dulac made both

abstract films such as Étude cinÉgraphique sur une arabesque ('Cinematic study of a

flourish', 1923) and stylish narratives, of which the best known is the pioneering feminist

work Smiling Madame Beudet ( La Souriante Madame Beudet, 1923). These aspects of

her work were linked by a theory of musical form, to 'express feelings through rhythms

and suggestive harmonies'. But Artaud opposed this vehemently, along with

representation itself. In his 'Theatre of Cruelty', Artaud foresaw the tearing down of

barriers between public and stage, act and emotion, actor and mask. In film, he wrote in

1927, he wanted 'pure images' whose meanings would emerge, free of verbal associations,

'from the very impact of the images themselves'. The impact must be violent, 'a shock

designed for the eyes, a shock founded, so to speak, on the very substance of the gaze'.

For Dulac too, film is 'impact', but typically its effect is 'ephemeral . . . analogous to that

provoked by musical harmonies'. Dulac fluently explored film as dream state (expressed

in the dissolving superimpositions in La Coquille) and so heralded the psychodrama film,

but Artaud wanted film only to keep the dream state's most violent and shattering

qualities, breaking the trance of vision.

Here, the avant-garde focused on the role of the spectator. In the abstract film, analogies

were sought with nonnarrative arts to challenge cinema as a dramatic form, and this led to

'visual music' or 'painting in motion'. In Jean Coudal's 1925 surrealist account, film

viewing is seen as akin to 'conscious hallucination', in which the body -undergoing

'temporary depersonalization' -- is robbed of 'its sense of its own existence. We are

nothing more than two eyes rivetted to ten meters of white screen, with a fixed and guided

gaze.' This critique was taken further in Dalí's "Abstract of a Critical History of the

Cinema" ( 1932), which argues that film's 'sensory base' in 'rhythmic impression' leads it

to the bête noire of harmony, defined as 'the refined product of abstraction', or

idealization, rooted in 'the rapid and continuous succession of film images, whose implicit

neologism is directly proportional to a specifically generalizing visual culture'.

Countermanding this, Dalí looks for 'the poetry of cinema' in 'a traumatic and violent

disequilibrium veering towards concrete irrationality'.

The goal of radical discontinuity did not stop short at the visual image, variously seen as

optical and illusory (by Bufiuel) or as retinal and illusionist (by Duchamp). The linguistic

codes in film (written or spoken) were also scoured, as in films by Man Ray, Buñuel, and

Duchamp which all play with intertitles to open a gap between word, sign, and object.

The attack on naturalism continued into the sound era, notably in Buñuel's documentary

on the Spanish poor, Las Hurdes ( Land without Bread, 1932). Here, the surrealist Pierre

Unik's commentary -- a seemingly authoritative 'voice-over' in the tradition of factual

filmslowly undermines the realism of the images, questioning the depiction (and viewing)

of its subjects by a chain of non sequiturs or by allusions to scenes which the crews -- we

are told -- failed, neglected, or refused to shoot. Lacunae open between voice, image, and

truth, just as the eye had been suddenly slashed in Un chien andalou.

Paradoxically, the assault on the eye (or on the visual order) can be traced back to the

'study of optics' which Cézanne had recommended to painters at the dawn of modernism.

This was characteristically refined by Walter Benjamin in 1936, linking mass

reproduction, the cinema, and art: 'By its transforming function, the camera introduces us

to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.'

The discontinuity principle underlies the avant-garde's key rhetorical figure, paratactic

montage, which breaks the flow -- or 'continuity' -- between shots and scenes, against the

grain of narrative editing. Defined by Richter as 'an interruption of the context in which it

is inserted', this form of montage first appeared in the avant-garde just as the mainstream

was perfecting its narrative codes. Its purpose is counter-narrative, by linking dissonant

images which resist habits of memory and perception to underline the film event as

phenomenological and immediate. At one extreme of parataxis, rapid cutting -down to the

single frame -- disrupts the forward flow of linear time (as in the 'dance' of abstract shapes

in Ballet mécanique). At the other extreme, the film is treated as raw strip, frameless and

ageless, to be photogrammed by Man Ray or hand-painted by Len Lye. Each option is a

variation spun from the kaleidoscope of the modernist visual arts.

This diversity -- reflected too in the search for noncommercial funding through patronage

and self-help cooperatives -- means that there is no single model of avantgarde film

practice, which has variously been seen to relate to the mainstream as poetry does to

prose, or music to drama, or painting to writing. None of these suggestive analogies is

exhaustive, in part because of the avantgarde's own insistence that film is a specific if

compound medium, whether basically 'photogenic' (as Epstein and others believed) or

'durational' (film was first defined as 'time-based' by Walter Ruttmann in 1919). The

modernist credo that art is a language brought the early avant-gardes close to Kuleshov

('the shot as a sign'), to Eisensteinian montage, and to Vertov's 'theory of intervals' in

which the gaps between shots -- like silences in post-serial music -- are equal in value to

the shots themselves.

Even the supposedly unified constructivist movement (itself made up of both rationalist

and spiritualist traits) included 'cinematology' (Malevich), the Dada-flavoured films of

Stefan and Franciszka Themerson (whose Adventures of a Good Citizen, made in Poland

in 1937, inspired Polanski's 1957 surreal skit Two Men and a Wardrobe), the abstract film

Black-Grey-White ( 1930) by László Moholy- Nagy as well as his later documentary

shorts (several, like a portrait of Lubetkin's London Zoo, made in England), the semiotic

film projects of the young Polish artist and political activist Mieczyslaw Szczuka and the

light-play experiments of the Bauhaus. For these and other artists filmmaking was an

additional activity to their work in other media.

FROM EUROPE TO THE USA

The inter-war period closes emblematically with Richter's exile from Nazi-occupied

Europe to the USA in 1940. Shortly before, he had completed his book The Struggle for

the Film, in which he had praised both the classic avantgarde as well as primitive cinema

and documentary film as opponents of mass cinema, seen as manipulative of its audience

if also shot through (despite itself) with new visual ideas. In the USA, Richter became

archivist and historian of the experimental cinema in which he had played a large role,

issuing (and re-editing, by most accounts) his own early films and Eggeling's. The famous

1946 San Francisco screenings, Art in Cinema, which he co-organized, brought together

the avant-garde classics with new films by Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, Curtis

Harrington, and Kenneth Anger; an avant-garde renaissance at a time when the movement

was largely seen as obsolete.

Richter's influence on the new wave was limited but substantial. His own later films --

such as Dreams that Money can Buy ( 1944-7) -- were long undervalued as baroque

indulgences (with episodes directed by other exiles such as Man Ray, Duchamp, Léger,

and Max Ernst) by contrast to the 'pure' -- and to a later generation more 'materialist'

-abstract films of the 1920s. Regarded at the time as 'archaic', Dreams now seems

uncannily prescient of a contemporary post-modernist sensibility. David Lynch selected

extracts from it, along with films by Vertov and Cocteau, for his 1986 BBC Arena film

survey. Stylish key episodes include Duchamp's reworking of his spiral films and early

paintings, themselves derived from cubism and chronophotography, with sound by John

Cage. Man Ray contributes a playful skit on the act of viewing, in which a semi-

hypnotized audience obeys increasingly absurd commands issued by the film they

supposedly watch. Ernst's episode eroticizes the face and body in extreme close-up and

rich colour, looking ahead to today's 'cinema of the body' in experimental film and video.

Richter's own classes in film-making were attended by, among others, another recent

immigrant Jonas Mekas, soon to be the energetic magus of the 'New American Cinema'.

Two decades earlier, the avant-garde had time-shifted cubism and Dada into film history

(both movements were essentially over by the time artists were able to make their own

films). By the 1940s, a new avant-garde again performed a complex, overlapping loop,

reasserting internationalism and experimentation, at a time as vital for transatlantic art as

early modernism had been for Richter's generation. Perhaps the key difference, as P.

Adams Sitney argues, is that the first avant-garde had added film to the potential and

traditional media at an artist's disposal, while new American (and soon European)

filmmakers after the Second World War began to see filmmaking more exclusively as an

art form that could exist in its own right, so that the artist-film-maker could produce a

body of work in that medium alone. Ironically, this generation also reinvented the silent

film, defying the rise of naturalistic sound which had in part doomed its avantgarde

ancestors in the 'poetic cinema' a decade before.

Bibliography

Curtis, David ( 1971), Experimental Cinema.

Drummond, Phillip, Dusinberre, Deke, and Rees, A. L. (eds.) ( 1979), Film as Film.

Hammond, Paul ( 1991), The Shadow and its Shadow.

Kuenzli, Rudolf E. (ed.) ( 1987), Dada and Surrealist Film.

Lawdor, Standish ( 1975), The Cubist Cinema.

Richter, Hans ( 1986), The Struggle for the Film.

Sitney, P. Adams ( 1974), Visionary Film.

Carl Theodor Dryer (1889-1968)

The illegitimate son of a maid and a factory-owner from Sweden, Dreyer was born and

brought up in Copenhagen, where his adoptive family subjected him to a miserable and

loveless childhood. To earn a living as soon as possible, he found work as theatre critic

and air correspondent for a Danish newspaper. He also began to write film scripts, the

first of which was made into a film in 1912. The following year he began an

apprenticeship at Nordisk, for whom he worked in various capacities and wrote some

twenty scripts. In 1919 he directed his first film, The President (Præsidenten), a

melodrama with a rather clotted Griffithian narrative structure which nevertheless showed

a strong visual sense. This was followed by the striking Leaves from Satan's Book (Blade

of Satans bog), an episode film partly modelled on Intolerance, shot in 1919 but not

released until 1921. The young Dreyer proved to be something of a perfectionist in

matters of mise en scène and in the choice and direction of actors. This provoked a break

with Nordisk and the director embarked on a independent career which led him to make

his remaining silent films in five different countries. The Parson's Widow ( Prästänkan,

1920) was shot in Norway for Svensk Filmindustri. While owing a stylistic debt to

Sjöström and Stiller, it shows a marked preference for character analysis at the expense of

narrative development. This impression is confirmed by Mikael, made in Germany in

1924, the story of an emotional triangle linking a painter, his male model, and a Russian

noblewoman who seduces the boy away from the master, depriving him of his inspiration.

Although heavy with symbolist overtones (derived in large part from the original novel by

Hermann Bang), Mikael represents Dreyer's first real attempt to analyse the inner life of

characters in relation to their environment.

Ordet ( 1955)

Dreyer fell out with Erich Pommer, the producer of Mikael, and returned to Denmark

where he made Master of the House ( Du skal ære din hustru, 1925), a drama about a

father whose egotistical and authoritarian behaviour wreaks terror on his wife and

children. Here the closeups on faces take on a crucial role. 'The human face', Dreyer

wrote, 'is a land one can never tire of exploring There is no greater experience in a studio

than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of

inspiration.' This idea is the key to The Passion of Joan of Arc ( La Passion de Jeanne

d'Arc, 1928), in which the close-up reaches its apotheosis in the long sustained sequence

of Joan's interrogation against a menacing architectural backdrop-all the more oppressive

for seeming to lack precise spatial location.

Dyeyer's last silent film, Joan of Arc was shot in France with massive technical and

financial resources and in conditions of great creative freedom. It was instantly acclaimed

by the critics as a masterpiece. But it was a commercial disaster, and for the next forty

years Dreyer was only able to direct five more feature films. Vampyr ( 1932) fared even

worse at the box office. Using only non-professional actors, Vampyr is one of the most

disturbing horror films ever made, with a hallucinatory and dreamlike visionary quality

intensified by a misty and elusive photographic style. But it was badly received, and

Dreyer found himself at the height of his powers with the reputation of being a tiresome

perfectionist despot whose every project was a failure.

Over the next ten years Dreyer worked on abortive projects in France, Britain, and

Somalia, before returning to his former career as a journalist in Denmark. Finally, in

1943, he was able to direct Day of Wrath (Vredens dag), a powerful statement on faith,

superstition and religious intolerance. Day of Wrath is stark and restrained, its style

pushing towards abstraction, enhanced by high-contrast photography. Danish critics saw

in the film a reference to Nazi persecution of the Jews, and the director was persuaded to

escape to Sweden. When the war was over, he returned to Copenhagen, scraping together

enough money from running a cinema to be able to finance The Word (Ordet, 1955) the

story of a feud between two families belonging to different religious sects, interlaced with

a love story between members of the opposing families. Ordet takes even further the

tendency towards simple and severe decors and mise en scène, intensified by the use of

long, slow takes. Even more extreme is Gertrud ( 1964), a portrait of a woman who

aspires to an ideal notion of love which she cannot find with her husband or either of her

two lovers, leading her to renounce sexual love in favour of asceticism and celibacy.

While the restrained classicism of Ordet won it a Golden Lion at the Venice Festival in

1955, the intransigence of Gertrud, with its static takes in which neither the camera not

the actors seem to move at all for long periods, was found excessive by the majority of

critics. A storm of abuse greeted what deserved to be seen as Dreyer's artistic testament, a

work of distilled and solemn contemplation. Dreyer continues to be admired for his visual

style, which, despite surface dissimilarities, is recognized as having a basic internal unity

and consistency, but the thematic coherence of his work-around issues of the unequal

struggle of women and the innocent against repression and social intolerance, the

inescapability of fate and death, the power of evil in earthly life-is less widely

appreciated. His last project was for a Life of Christ, in which he hoped to achieve a

synthesis of all stylistic and thematic concerns. He died shortly after he had succeeded in

raising the finance from the Danish government and Italian state television for this

project, on which he had been working for twenty years.

PAOLO CHERCHI USAI SELECT FILMOGRAPHY Præsidenten (The President)

( 1919); Prästänkan (The Parson's Widow) ( 1920); Blade af Satans bog (Leaves from

Satan's Book) ( 1921); Die Gezeichneten (Love One Another) ( 1922); Der var engang

(Once upon a Time) ( 1922); Mikael (Michael / Chained / Heart's Desire / The Invert)

( 1924); Du skal ære din hustru (The Master of the House) ( 1925); Glomdalsbruden (The

Bride of Glomdale) ( 1926); La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc)

( 1928); Vampyr der Traum des Allan Gray (Vampyr / Vampire) ( 1932); Vredens dag

(Day of Wrath) ( 1943); Tvä Människor (Two People) ( 1945); Ordet (The Word) ( 1955);

Gertrud ( 1964)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bordwell, David ( 1981), The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Drouzy, Maurice ( 1982), Carl Th. Dreyer né Nilsson.

Monty, lb ( 1965), Portrait of Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Sarris, Andrew (ed.) ( 1967), Interviews with Film Directors. .

Schrader, Paul ( 1972), Transcendental Style in Film.

Serials

BEN SINGER

I am the serial. I am the black sheep of the picture family and the reviled of critics. I am

the soulless one with no moral, no character, no uplift. I am ashamed. . . . Ah me, if I

could only be respectable. If only the hair of the great critic would not rise whenever I

pass by and if only he would not cry, 'Shame! Child of commerce! Bastard of art!'

('The Serial Speaks', New York Dramatic Mirror, 19 August 1916)

It is rare indeed for a promotional article in the 1910s to lapse, however briefly, from the

film industry's perennial mantra, 'We are attracting the better classes; We are uplifting the

cinema; We are preserving the highest moral and artistic standards . . .' Probably few

readers ever took such affirmations as anything more than perfunctory, and dubiously

sincere, reassurances to a cultural establishment that approached the cinema with an

unpredictable mixture of hostility and meddlesome paternalism. Nevertheless, it is

unusual -- and telling -- that a studio mouthpiece (in this case, George B. Seitz, Pathé's

serial tsar) should see fit to abandon the 'uplift' conceit altogether. Clearly, it was

impossible even to pretend that the serial played any part in the cinema's putative

rehabilitation. The serial's intertextual background doomed it to disrepute. Growing

directly out of late nineteenth-century working-class amusements -- popular-priced stage

melodrama (of the buzz-saw variety), and cheap fiction in dime novels, 'story papers',

feuilletons, and penny dreadfuls -- the serial was geared to a decidedly lowbrow audience.

As early titles like The Perils of Pauline, The Exploits of Elaine, The House of Hate, The

Lurking Peril, and The Screaming Shadow make obvious, serials were packaged

sensationalism. Their basic ingredients come as no surprise: as Ellis Oberholtzer,

Pennsylvania's cranky head censor in the 1910s, described the genre, 'It is crime,

violence, blood and thunder, and always obtruding and outstanding is the idea of sex.'

Elaborating every form of physical peril and 'thrill', serials promised sensational spectacle

in the form of explosions, crashes, torture contraptions, elaborate fights, chases, and last-

minute rescues and escapes. The stories invariably focused on the machinations of

underworld gangs and mystery villains ('The Hooded Terror', 'The Clutching Hand', etc.)

as they tried to assassinate or usurp the fortunes of a pretty young heroine and her

heroboyfriend. The milieu was an aggressively non-domestic, 'masculine' world of hide-

outs, opium dens, lumber mills, diamond mines, abandoned warehouses-into which the

plucky girl heroine ventured at her peril.

Serials were a hangover from the nickelodeon era. They stood out as mildly 'shameful' at

a time when the film industry was trying to broaden its market by making innocuous

middlebrow films suitable for heterogeneous audiences in the larger theatres being built at

the time. Rather than catering to 'the mass' -- a homogeneous, 'classless' audience fancied

by the emerging Hollywood institution -- serials were made for 'the masses' -- the

uncultivated, predominantly working- and lower-middle-class and immigrant audience

that had supported the incredible 'nickelodeon boom'. Oberholtzer again offers a sharp

assessment:

The crime serial is meant for the most ignorant class of the population with the grossest

tastes, and it principally flourishes in the picture halls in mill villages and in the thickly

settled tenement houses and low foreign-speaking neighborhoods in large cities. Not a

producer, I believe, but is ashamed of such an output, yet not more than one or two of the

large manufacturing companies have had the courage to repel the temptation to thus swell

their balances at the end of the fiscal year.

Serials were also a proletarian product in Britain (and probably everywhere else). A writer

in the New Statesman in 1918 observed that British cinema-goers paid much higher ticket

prices than the Americans, but he notes an exception to this rule:

Only in those ramshackle 'halls' of our poorer streets, where noisy urchins await the next

episode of some long since antiquated 'Transatlantic Serial' does one notice the proletarian

invitation of twopenny and fourpenny seats.

Almost never screened in large first-run theatres, serials were a staple of small, cheap

'neighbourhood' theatres (for all intents and purposes, these theatres were simply

nickelodeons that had survived into the 1910s). Although the serious money was in big

first-run theatres, small theatres still constituted the large majority in terms of sheer

numbers, and the studios, despite their uplift proclamations, were reluctant to give up this

lowbrow market.

WHY SERIALS?

The film industry turned to serials for a number of reasons, aside from the ease of tapping

into an already established popular market for sensational stories. It saw the commercial

logic of adopting the practice of serialization, already a mainstay of popular magazines

and newspapers. With every episode culminating in a suspenseful cliffhanger ending, film

serials encouraged a steady volume of return customers, tantalized and eager for the fix of

narrative closure withheld in the previous instalment. In this system of deliberately

prolonged desire punctuated by fleeting, intermittent doses of satisfaction, serials

conveyed a certain acuity about the new psychology of consumerism in modern

capitalism.

Serials also made sense, from the studios' perspective, because, at least in their earliest

years, they represented an attractive alternative for manufacturers who were incapable or

unwilling to switch over to five- and six-reel feature films. Released one or two reels at a

time for a dozen or so instalments, serials could be pitched as 'big' titles without overly

daunting the studios' still relatively modest production infrastructure and entrenched

system of short-reel distribution. For several years, serials were, in fact, billed as 'feature'

attractions -- the centrepiece of a short-reel 'variety' programme. Later, as real feature

films became the main attraction, serial instalments were used to fill out the programme,

along with a short comedy and newsreel.

Serials appeared at a pivotal moment in the institutional history of film promotion:

producers were just realizing the importance of 'exploitation' (i.e. advertising), but were

still frustrated by brief film runs that kept advertising relatively inefficient. As late as

1919, only about one theatre in a hundred ran films for an entire week, one in eight ran

them for half a week, and over four out of five changed films daily. In this situation,

serials were ideal vehicles for massive publicity. They allowed the industry to flex its

exploitation muscle, since each serial stayed at a theatre for three to four months. Serial

producers invested extremely heavily in newspaper, magazine, trade journal, billboard,

and tram advertising, as well as grandiose cash-prize contests. Serials helped inaugurate

the ' Hollywood' system of publicity in which studios paid more for advertising than for

the production of the film itself.

The emergence of serials was linked to one form of publicity in particular. Until around

1917, virtually every film serial was released in tandem with prose versions published

simultaneously in newspapers and national magazines. Movies and short fiction were

bound together as two halves of what might be described as a larger, multimedia, textual

unit. These fiction tie-ins -- inviting the consumer to 'Read it Here in the Morning; See it

on the Screen Tonight!' -- saturated the entertainment market-place to a degree never seen

since. Appearing in major newspapers in every big city and in hundreds (the studios

claimed thousands) of provincial papers, the serials' publicity engaged a potential

readership well into the tens of millions. This practice exploded the scope of film

publicity, and paved the way for the cinema's graduation to a truly mass medium.

THE FILMS AND THEIR FORMULAS, 1912-1920

Although series films (narratively complete but with continuing characters and milieu)

had appeared as early as 1908, or earlier if one counts comedy series, the first serial film

proper (with a story-line connecting separate instalments) was Edison's What Happened

to Mary, released in twelve monthly 'chapters' beginning in July 1912. Recounting the

adventures of a country girl (and, needless to say, unknowing heiress) as she discovers the

pleasures and perils of big-city life while eluding an evil uncle and sundry other villains,

the story was published simultaneously (along with numerous stills from the screen

version) in Ladies' World, a major women's monthly magazine. Although critics derided

the serial as 'mere melodrama of action' and 'a lurid, overdrawn thriller', it was popular at

the box-office, making the actress Mary Fuller, playing Mary Dangerfield, one of the

cinema's first really big (if rather ephemeral) stars. The commercial success of What

Happened to Mary prompted the Selig Polyscope Company and the Chicago Tribune

syndicate to team up in the production and promotion of The Adventures of Kathlyn,

exhibited and published fortnightly throughout the first half of 1914. In keeping with the

early star system's trope of eponymous protagonists, Kathlyn Williams played Kathlyn

Hare, a fetching American girl who, in order to save her kidnapped father, reluctantly

becomes the Queen of Allahah, a principality in India.

When it became clear that Kathlyn was a huge hit, virtually every important studio at the

time (with the notable exception of Biograph) started making action series and twelve- to

fifteen-chapter serials, almost all connected to prose-version newspaper tie-ins. Kalem

produced The Hazards of Helen, a railway adventure series that ran for 113 weekly

instalments between 1914 and 1917, as well as The Girl Detective series ( 1915), The

Ventures of Marguerite ( 1915), and a number of other 'plucky heroine' series. Thanhouser

had one of the silent era's biggest commercial successes with The Million Dollar Mystery

( 1914), although its follow-up Zudora ( The Twenty Million Dollar Mystery) was

reportedly a flop. By far the biggest producers of serials in the 1910s were Pathé (its

American branch), Universal, Mutual, and Vitagraph. Pathé relied heavily on its

successful Pearl White vehicles -- The Perils of Pauline ( 1914), The Exploits of Elaine

( 1915 -- and two sequels), The Iron Claw ( 1916), Pearl of the Army ( 1916), The Fatal

Ring ( 1917), The House of Hate ( 1918) (which Eisenstein cites as an influence), The

Black Secret ( 1919), and The Lightning Raider ( 1919) - -as well as numerous serials

starring Ruth Roland and various lesser-known 'serial queens'. Universal, like Pathé, had

at least two serials running at any time throughout the decade. Several were directed by

Francis Ford (John Ford's older brother) and starred the duo of Ford and Grace Cunard:

Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery ( 1914) (the first film Luis Bufiuel recalled ever seeing),

The Broken Coin ( 1915), The Adventures of Peg o'the Ring ( 1916), and The Purple

Mask ( 1916). Mutual signed up Helen Holmes (of Hazards of . . . fame) and continued in

the vein of railway stunt thrillers with The Girl and the Game ( 1916), Lass of the

Lumberlands ( 191617), The Lost Express ( 1917), The Railroad Raiders ( 1917), and

others. Vitagraph at first claimed it was offering a 'better grade' of serials for a 'better class

of audience', but in truth its serials are hardly distinguishable from the sensational

melodramas of its competitors.

Pearl White in vigorous mode in Plunder ( 1923), her last serial for Pathé in America

grade' of serials for a 'better class of audience', but in truth its serials are hardly

distinguishable from the sensational melodramas of its competitors.

The 1910s was the era of the serial queen. In their stuntfilled adventures as 'girl spies',

'girl detectives', 'girl reporters', etc., serial heroines demonstrated a kind of toughness,

bravery, agility, and intelligence that excited audiences both for its novelty and for its

feminist resonance. Serial queens defied the ideology of female passivity and domesticity,

and instead displayed traditionally 'masculine' attributes, competences, and interests. They

tapped into a larger cultural fascination with the 'New Woman', a revised model of

femininity floated by the media (if not entirely adopted in practice) during the rise of

metropolitan modernity and the disintegration of the Victorian world-view. While still

fulfilling classic melodrama conventions of female imperilment, serial heroines in the

1910s were not simply objects to be saved by the hero. To be sure, they still needed to be

rescued with some regularity, but they also got out of plights using their own wits and

daring. And in the serial's system of polymorphous prowess, one is almost as likely to see

the heroine rescue the hero tied-to-the-railroad-tracks as the reverse.

In every serial, the conflict between villain and hero/heroine expresses itself in a back-

and-forth struggle both for the possessiolp of the heroine (whom the villain constantly

kidnaps or tries to kill) and also for the possession of a highly prized object -- what Pearl

White called the 'weenie'. The weenie took many forms: a blueprint for a new torpedo; an

ebony idol containing the key to a treasure trove; a secret document outlining the defence

of the Panama Canal; a special fuel to power a machine that disintegrates people; the

secret formula for turning dirt into diamonds, and so on. The capture and recapture of the

weenie afforded a sufficiently loose structure on which to hang a series of thrills.

Another constant in serial stories relates to the pivotal position of the heroine's father,

along with the total nonexistence of any mother characters (and, for that matter, most

other female figures as well). The heroine is always the daughter (often an adopted one)

of a powerful man (rich industrialist, army general, fire chief, explorer, inventor, or

newspaper mogul) who is assassinated by the villain in the first episode or (less

frequently) abducted and blackmailed. The serial hinges on the daughter's fight to gain

her inheritance while the villain and sundry henchmen try to kill her and usurp it.

Alternatively, the serial involves the daughter's fight to save her father from the clutches

of the villain, redeem his tarnished name, or simply aid the father (independent of his

supervision) in thwarting his, and the nation's, enemies.

Although when they hit they hit resoundingly, American serials had an erratic commercial

history. Information on box-office receipts is hard to come by, but tradejournal surveys of

film exchanges (rental offices) may tell us something about the serial's popularity among

audiences. Between 1914 and 1917, Motion Picture News conducted a number of in-

depth polls of exchangemen. In October 1914, to the question 'Do serials continue

popular?', 60 per cent said 'yes', while about 20 per cent said 'no' (the rest saying 'fairly').

A year later, however, the 'noes' had swelled to 70 per cent. But a year after that, at the

end of 1916, the serial's popularity had rallied again, with about a 65 : 35 percentage split

between 'yes' and 'no' responses. By the summer of 1917 the responses had levelled out to

exactly 50: 50. A number of factors explain the serial's mixed popularity among

distributors and (presumably) exhibitors and audiences. At least in part it reflected the

growing rift, on many levels, between a residual 'nickelodeon' cinema, geared toward

small-time exhibitors and lower-class audiences, and an emergent Hollywood model of

mass entertainment. It is also likely that many audiences simply tired of the serial's highly

formulaic stories, dubiously thrilling thrills, and low production values.

INTERNATIONAL SERIES AND SERIALS

Although an international history of series and serials has yet to be written, series and

serials were far from being just an American phenomenon. France's considerable

investment in series and serials is well covered in Richard Abel's history of silent French

cinema. Éclair pioneered the genre with the extremely popular series Nick Carter, le roi

des ditectives ('Nick Carter, king of the detectives', 1908), followed by Zigomar ( 1911)

and various sequels, all directed by Victorin Jasset. Louis Feuillade directed a number of

celebrated underworld crime serials for Gaumont: Fantômas ( 1913-14), Les Vampires

('The Vampires', 1915-16), Judex ( 1917), and La Nouvelle Mission dejudex ('Judex's new

mission', 1918).

While these and other domestically produced serials enjoyed considerable popularity, it

was Pathé's Americanmade serials that caused the biggest sensation among French

audiences. Released, as in America, in conjunction with massive newspaper tie-ins, Les

Mystères de New York ( 1916) (a repackaging of twenty-two episodes from The Exploits

of Elaine and its two sequels) was a smash hit and began a trend in ciné-romans (or 'film-

novels').

In Britain leading serials were, among others, The Adventures of Lieutenant Rose ( 1909),

The Adventures of Lieutenant Daring ( 1911), The Exploits of Three-Fingered Kate

( 1912). Films Lloyds in Germany made the Detective Webb series ( 1914), which, like

Feuillade's Fantômas, was comprised of featurelength instalments. In Russia, a few serials

followed after the huge success of imported American and French serials: Jay Leyda

briefly cites Drankov's Sonka, the Golden Hand, Bauer's Irina Kirsanova, and Gardin and

Protazanov's Petersburg Slums. Italy had Tigris and Za la Mort; Germany had

Homunculus (an early instance of the silent German cinema's fascination with stories

about man-made supermen); and Austria The Invisible Ones.

Third World cinemas also made serials, although extremely little is known about this

topic. A particularly fascinating implementation of the serial-queen formula is a group of

Hindi serials starring 'Fearless Nadia', an Australian actress of Welsh-Greek extraction.

Inspired by imported American serials, director Homi Wadis also made the feature

Hunterwali (The Lady with the Whip) with Fearless Nadia in 1935. Bombay's Kohinoor

Studios produced numerous follow-up serials, as did other Indian studios. The Diamond

Queen ( 1940) is among those still available from Indian distributors.

THE 1920S AND AFTER

In the United States, film serials lived out the 1920s, and survived to the rise of television,

as a low-budget 'B' product with limited distribution and an appeal primarily to

hyperactive children. To some degree, this had been the case from the very start, but after

the 1910s it became more obvious that serials were slapdash juvenile movies for 'Saturday

afternoon at the Bijou'. With the phasing out of prose-version tie-ins in the late 1910s,

serials never again enjoyed wide publicity and distribution. Furthermore, the

disappearance of the classical blood-andthunder stage melodrama, and a generational shift

that caused adult audiences to view overwrought sensational melodrama as ridiculous and

old-fashioned rather than exhilarating, solidified the serial's decline into a cartoonish

children's genre. The serial's essential formula (hero and heroine fight villain for

possession of weenie) remained unchanged throughout, but the genre underwent some

key transformations. The 'serial-queen' cycle faded away in the late 1910s and early 1920s

as emphasis shifted toward the adventures of traditional beefy heroes like Elmo Lincoln

( Elmo, the Mighty, 1919; Elmo, the Fearless, 1920; The Adventures of Tarzan, 1921),

Eddie Polo ( King of the Circus, 1920; Do or Die, 1921), and Charles Hutchinson

( Hurricane Hutch, 1921; Go Get 'Em Hutch, 1922). Evidently, the plucky New Woman's

novelty had worn off and it was incumbent upon serial heroines to resume the role of

damsel in distress.

The serial's intertextual links also changed. Serials became much more closely associated

with pre-existing characters in the Sunday comics, comic books, radio, and pulp

magazines. In 1936 Universal bought the rights to many comic strips owned by the King

Features Syndicate, and other studios made similar deals. Serials now fleshed out heroes

like Flash Gordon, Superman, Captain Marvel, Dick Tracy, Batman, Buck Rogers, The

Phantom, Captain America, Deadwood Dick, the Lone Ranger, and so on.

With Mutual's dissolution in 1918 and the purchase of the already hapless Vitagraph by

Warner Bros. in 1925, Path6 and Universal remained as the key serial producers in the

1920s. Pathé got out of the serial-producing business in 1928, when Joseph P. Kennedy

came in and reorganized the studio. An upstart company, Mascot Pictures, filled the void

left by Pathé's departure, and then in 1935 merged with a few other concerns to form

Republic Pictures. The quintessential 'poverty row' studio, Republic nevertheless made

the best serials, according to most collectors and nostalgia buffs. In terms of output,

Universal, Republic, and Columbia Pictures were the undisputed 'big three' in sound-era

serials, each studio offering three or four a year. Running weekly for between twelve and

fifteen weeks, serials filled up an entire exhibition 'season', one leading directly into the

next. An assortment of minor independent producers made one or two serials in the

1930s, but none at all ventured into this field thereafter. With serials falling even lower in

reputation and commercial importance, Universal bowed out for good in 1946, while

Republic and Columbia plodded along making serials until around 1935, when television

became the chosen medium for weekly adventure series.

In all, Mascot and Republic made ninety serials between 1929 and 1955; Columbia made

fifty-seven between 1937 and 1956; and Universal made sixty-nine between 1929 and

1946. Independents account for fifteen serials between 1930 and 1937. In addition to

these 231 sound serials, just under 300 serials were made in the silent era. All told, this

adds up to over 7,200 episodes. If serials are a minor footnote in the history of film as art,

they deserve recognition as an important phenomenon in the history of cinema as a social

and institutional commodity.

Bibliography

Barbour, Alan G. ( 1977), Cliffhanger: A Pictorial History of the Motion Picture Serial.

Kinnard, Roy ( 1983), Fifty Years of Serial Thrills.

Lahue, Kalton C. ( 1964), Continued Next Week: A History of the Moving Picture Serial.

Oberholtzer, Ellis P. ( 1922), The Morals of the Movies.

Singer, Ben ( 1993), "Fictional Tie-ins and Narrative Intelligibility, 1911-18".

Stedman, Raymond William ( 1977), The Serials: Suspense and Drama by Instalment.

Louis Feuillade (1873-1925)

The youngest son of a devoutly Catholic, anti-republican family from Languedoc, Louis

Feuillade arrived in Paris with his wife in 1898. He worked as a journalist before

becoming an assistant editor for the right-wing Revuemondiale. Engaged by Gaumont in

December 1905 as a scenario writer and first assistant to Alice Guy, by 1907 he had

advanced to head of film production and was active in writing and directing all of the

genres produced by Gaumont, from trick film ( L'Homme aimanté, 1907), to domestic

melodrama ( La Possession de l'enfant, 1909).

The popularity of the film series had been established in France by Éclair's Nick Winter

crime series ( 1908). In 1910 Feuillade introduced the Bébé comic series, starring René

Dary, which ran to nearly seventy films over the course of two years. In 1911. He wrote

and directed Les Vipères as the first of the successful Scènes de la vie telle qu'elle est

series, view merged the popular traditions of melodrama and realism. The Bout-de-Zan

series, starring René Poyen, replaced Bébé in 1912, eventually running to forty films by

the time of the war.

During these first six years, Feuillade's films were marked by sober, restrained acting,

solid narrative construction, a flexible editing style, and, together with his cameraman

Albert Sorgius, he created a masterful sense of composition and lighting. Many films in

the Vie telle qu'elle est series exposed the tragic, or at least pathetic, consequences of

unjustifiable social and sexual stereotyping.

In 1913 came the film for which Feuillade is best remembered, Fantômas, based on the

crime novels of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre and starring Navarre as an elusive

figure of amazing power and savoir-faire. The first of five feature-length films, Fantômas

skilfully established the 'fantastic realism' that Feuillade and his new cameraman Guérin

would make characteristic of the series before it was interrupted by the war: the master

criminal circulated freely through all kinds of actual landscapes and social milieux,

particularly in and around Paris, his incredible, sometimes bloody exploits deftly masked

by the reassuringly mundane façade of daily life.

When Gaumont resumed film production, in 1915, Feuillade returned to the crime series

with Les Vampires, ten feature-length episodes released monthly to July 1916. Here it was

Musidora, as the femme fatale Irma Vep, who emerged as the film's most powerful,

repeatedly deceptive figure, infatuating the reporter hero ( Édouard Mathé) on the track of

her black-clad criminal band and deflecting his plans to revenge his kidnapped wife.

Partly in reaction to provincial bannings of Les Vampires, Feuillade enlisted the popular

novelist Arthur Bernède (and another cameraman, Klausse) to create more conventional

adventure stories for his next two serials, the hugely successful Judex ( 1917) and La

Nouvelle Mission deJudex

Judex ( 1917)

Judex ( 1918). Wrapped in a black cape and accompained by a sidekick (Marcel

Lévesque), the detective Judex (René Cresté) performed like an updated chivalric hero,

protecting the weak and righting wrongs in order to revenge his father and reclaim the

honour of his name.After the war, Gaumont's production began to decline and Feuillade

made fewer but more diverse films. Serials continued to be his trademark, but they went

through several changes. In Tih-Minh ( 1919), he resurrected the Vampire gang as

displaced 'colonial' antagonists to a French explorer (Cresté) in search of buried treasure

and the love of an Indo-Chinese princess; in Barrabas ( 1920) he loosed a devious

criminal gang to operate behind the façade of an international bank. Les Deux Gamines

( 1921), L'Orpheline ( 1921), and Parisette ( 1922), however, turned to the very different

formula of the domestic melodrama, focusing on an orphaned ingénue heroine (Sandra

Milowanoff) who, after long suffering, married the 'sentimental hero' (in one series, René

Clair). The last of Feuillade's serials took another turn towards historical adventure (soon

to become the trademark of Jean Sapène's Cinéromans), best illustrated in the spectacular

action of le Fils du flibustier ( 1922). Around this time some of Feuillade's films reverted

to the 'realist' tradition that he had worked in before the war. Using a topical story of

German spies among refugees displaced by the war, Vendémiaire ( 1919), made with his

last cameraman, Maurice Champreux, documented coat traffic on the Rhone River and

the life of the Bas-Languedoc peasant community during the grape harvest. Le Gamin de

Paris ( 1923), by contrast, achieved an unusual sense of charm and poignancy through

'naturalistic' acting (by Milowanoff and Poyen), location shooting in the Belleville section

of Paris, skilful studio lighting and set décor (by Robert Jules-Garnier), and American-

style continuity editing. In February 1925, on the eve of shooting another historical serial,

Le Stigmate (which would be completed by Champreux), Feuillade was taken ill, and dies

of acute peritonitis. RICHARD ABELSELECT FILMOGRAPHYSerials Bébé ( 1910);

Scènes de la vie telle qu-elle est ( 1911); Bout-de Zan ( 1912); Fantômas ( 1913); Les

Vampires ( 1915); Judex ( 1917); La Nouvelle Mission de Judex ( 1918); Tih-Minh

( 1919); Vendémiaire ( 1919); Barrabas ( 1920); Les Deux Gamines ( 1921); L'Orpheline (

1921); Parisette ( 1922); Le Fils du flibustier ( 1922); Le Gamin de Paris ( 1923)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abel, Richard ( 1993), The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914.

Lacassin, Francis ( 1964), Louis Feuillade.

Roud, Richard (ed.) ( 1980), Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (entry on Louis

Feuillade).

NATIONAL CINEMAS

French Silent Cinema

RICHARD ABEL

In 1907, the French press repeatedly erupted in astonishment over the speed with which

the cinema was supplanting other spectacle entertainments like the caféconcert and music

hall and even threatening to displace the theatre. As a song from the popular revue, Tu l'as

l'allure, put it:

So when will the Ciné drop and die? Who knows. So when will the Café-conc' revive?

Who knows.

Whatever the attitudes taken -- and they ranged from exhilaration to resigned dismay --

there was no doubt that, in France, 1907 was 'the year of the cinema' or, as one writer

enthused, 'the dawn of a new age of Humanity'. So limitless seemed the cinema's future

that it set off an explosion of entrepreneurial activity.

PATHÉ-FRÈRES INDUSTRIALIZES THE CINEMA

At the centre of that activity was Pathé- Frères as it systematically industrialized every

sector of the new industry. Two years before, Pathé had pioneered a system of mass

production (headed by Ferdinand Zecca) which soon had the company marketing at least

half a dozen film titles per week (or 40,000 metres of positive film stock per day) as well

as 250 cameras, projectors, and other apparatuses per month. By 1909, those figures had

doubled across the board, and the Pathé studio camera and projector had become the

standard industry models. This production capacity enabled Pathé to construct one cinema

after another in Paris and other cities, beginning in 1906-7, shifting film exhibition away

from the fairgrounds to permanent sites in urban shopping and entertainment districts. By

1909 Pathé had a circuit of nearly 200 cinemas throughout France and Belgium, probably

the largest in Europe. In order better to regulate distribution of its product within that

circuit, in 1907-8 the company also set up a network of six regional agencies to rent,

rather than sell, its weekly programme of films. This network augmented the dozens of

agencies Pathé had opened across the globe, beginning as early as 1904, and through

which it quickly dominated the world-wide sale and rental of films. By 1907, one-third to

one-half of the films making up American nickelodeon programmes were Pathé's -- as a

general rule, the company shipped up to 200 copies of each film title to the United States.

As the 'empire' of this first international cinema corporation began to stabilize (and

eventually contract in the USA because of MPPC restrictions) and film distribution and

exhibition became its most secure sources of revenue, Pathé gradually shifted film

production to a growing number of quasi-independent affiliates. By 1913-14, Pathé Frères

had become a kind of parent company ( Charles Pathé himself invoked the analogy of a

book publisher) to a host of production affiliates, from France (SCAGL, Valetta, and

Comica) to Russia, Italy, Holland, and the USA.

The other French companies engaged in the cinema's expansion either followed Pathé's

lead or found a profitable niche in one or more sectors of the industry. Léon Gaumont's

company, Pathé's closest rival, was the only other vertically integrated corporation active

in every sector, from manufacturing equipment to producing, distributing, and exhibiting

films. Its 1911 renovation of the Gaumont-Palace (seating 3,400 people), for instance, not

only anchored its own circuit of cinemas but spurred the construction of more 'palace'

cinemas in Paris and elsewhere. Unlike Pathé, however, Gaumont steadily increased

direct investment in production so that it too could release at least half a dozen film titles

per week. Under the management of Charles Jourjon and Marcel Vandal, Éclair operated

within a slightly narrower sphere, having never established a circuit of cinemas to present

its product. Instead, to fuel its aggressive expansion between 1910 and 1913, Éclair

concentrated on producing and distributing films as well as manufacturing various kinds

of apparatuses. Along with Pathé, it was the only French company with the capital and

foresight to open its own production studio in the USA. Most smaller French companies

either confined their efforts to production (Film d'Art, Eclipse, and Lux) or concentrated

on distribution (AGC). The most important independent distributor, Louis Aubert,

embarked on a somewhat different trajectory, much as Universal, Fox, and Paramount

would slightly later in the USA. Aubert's company prospered through its exclusive

contracts to release films by the major Italian and Danish producers in France, including

Quo vadis?; by 1913 Aubert was reinvesting his profits in a circuit of 'palace' cinemas in

Paris as well as a new studio for producing his own films.

What kinds of films dominated French cinema programmes during this period, and what

specific titles could be singled out as significant? The actualités, trick films, and féeries

which once characterized the early 'cinema of attractions' had, by 1907, given way to a

more fully narrativized cinema, especially through Pathé's standardized production of

comic chase films and what its catalogue advertised as 'dramatic and realist' films, often

directed by Albert Capellani. The latter category covered domestic melodramas such as

La Loi du pardon ('The law of pardon', 1906), in which families were threatened with

dissolution and then securely reunited, and Grand Guignol variants such as Pour un

collier! ('For a necklace!', 1907), in which the resolution was anything but secure. Within

such films there coalesced a system of representation and narration that relied not only on

longtake tableaux (recorded by Pathé's 'trademark' waist-level camera), bold red

intertitles, inserted letters, and accompanying sound effects but on changes in framing

through camera movement, cut-in close shots, point-ofview shots, and reverse-angle

cutting as well as on various forms of repetition and alternation in editing. This system

achieved remarkable effects in melodramas as diverse as The Pirates ( 1907), A Narrow

Escape ( 1908) (which D. W. Grif fith remade in 1909 as The Lonely Villa), and

L'Homme aux gants blancs ('The man with white gloves', 1908) as well as in comic films

like Ruse de mari ('The husband's trick', 1907) and Le Cheval emballé ('The wrapped-up

horse', 1908). In other words, Pathé films were deploying most of the elements so basic to

the system of narrative continuity, all of which historians still often attribute to slightly

later Vitagraph or Biograph films.

Another instance of increasing standardization within the French cinema was the

continuing series, a marketing strategy in which one film after another could be organized

around a central character (identified by name) and a single actor. As early as 1907, Pathé

began releasing a comic series entitled Boireau, named after a recurring character played

by André Deed. Boireau's success soon led to other comic series (especially after Deed

left France to work in Italy as Cretinetti). In 1909 Gaumont introduced its Calino series,

with Clément Migé often playing a bumbling civil servant; the following year there was

the Bébé series, with René Dary; two years later came the incredibly wacky Onésime

series, with Ernest Bourbon, and Bout-deZan, with René Poyen as an even more

threatening enfant terrible. As for Pathé itself, among the half-dozen comic series it

regularly distributed, two stood out above the rest. One was Rigadin, starring Charles

Prince as a parodic white-collar Don Juan; Le Nez de Rigadin ('Rigadin's Nose', 1911),

for instance, ruthlessly mocks his large upturned nose, one of the comic's singular assets.

The other starred Max Linder, usually as a young bourgeois dandy, and quickly made him

'the king of the cinematograph'. Skilful, cleverly structured gags distinguish Linder's work

from La Petite Rosse ('The little nag', 1909) through Victime du quinquina ('Quinine

victim', 1911) to Max pidicure ('Max the pedicure', 1914). So popular was the comic

series that Éclair, Eclipse, and Lux all made them a regular part of their weekly

programmes. The one variation on this strategy came from Éclair. Victorin Jasset's Nick

Carter series ( 1908-10) drew its formula from the American detective dime novels just

being translated into French and proved such a success that Éclair soon adapted others,

making the male adventure series a trademark of its production.

Together with these standardization practices came a concerted attempt to legitimize the

cinema as a respectable cultural form. Here, the trade press was unusually active,

especially Phono-Ciné-Gazette ( 1905-9), edited by Pathé's collaborator, the Paris lawyer

Edmond Benoît-Lévy, and Ciné-Journal ( 1908-14), edited by Georges Dureau. Yet these

efforts at legitimization were most visible in the production of literary adaptations or

films d'art, led by Film d'Art and SCAGL, new companies with close ties to prestigious

Paris theatres. The earliest and best known of these was Film d'Art's L'Assassinat du Duc

de Guise ('The assassination of the Duc de Guise', 1908), whose deepspace mise-en-scène

(including 'authentic' décors), economical acting style (particularly that of Charles Le

Bargy), and succinct editing had a considerable influence, at least in France. That

influence can be seen, in conjunction with the system of narrative continuity earlier

developed by Pathé, in subsequent historical films, many based on nineteenth-century

plays and operas. Although most clearly evident in those dealing with an indigenous

French history, such as SCAGL's La Mort du Duc d'Enghien ('The death of the Duc

d'Enghien', 1909) and Gaumont's Le Huguenot ('The Huguenot', 1909), it is also apparent

in films as disparate as Film d'Art's La Tosca ( 1909) and Werther ( 1910). Generally,

those running counter to this pattern were 'oriental' films such as Pathé's Cléopâtre and

Sémiramis (both 1910), whose privileged moments of spectacle (accentuated by the

company's trademark stencil colour) and 'exotic' characters served to reinforce the

mandate for France's colonial empire.

Gaumont's 'realist' Scènes de la vie telle qu'elle est ('Scenes from Real Life') series, the

same company's bleak railyard melodrama, Sur les rails ('On the rails', 1912), directed by

Léonce Perret, or Pathé's intricately choreographed bourgeois melodrama La Coupable

('The guilty one', 1912), directed by René Leprince. At least two short films from Pathé

and Gaumont respectively -- Georges Monca's astonishing L'Épouvante ('The terror',

1911), starring Mistinguett, and Henri Fescourt's Jeux d'enfants ('Children's games', 1913)

-- even used extensive cross-cutting with a skill that rivalled Griffith's. Finally, the best of

the comic series increased to a full reel, a length perfectly suited for Perret's sophisticated

Léonce series ( 1912-14). Films such as Les Épingles ('The pins'), Léonce à la campagne

(Léonce in the country'), and Léonce cinématographiste (Léonce the cinematographer')

(all 1913) reveal that this series deftly exploited the social situations in which Perret

himself, as a solidly assured bourgeois type, either outsmarted or was outsmarted by his

wife (usually Suzanne Grandais) in a perpetual battle for domestic dominance.

It was also in 1911 that 'feature' films of three or more reels began appearing on cinema

programmes. Pathé introduced the first of these that spring: Capellani's historical

melodrama Le Courrier de Lyon ('The courier of Lyons'), and Gérard Bourgeois's 'social

drama' Victimes d'alcool ('Victims of alcohol'). Not until the autumn, however, was there

a clear sense that such lengthy films would prove acceptable and profitable. Every major

production company invested in the new format, with films that spanned the spectrum of

available genres. Pathé and Film d'Art drew on the cultural capital of familiar literary

adaptations with, respectively, Notre Dame de Paris ('The hunchback of Notre-Dame'),

starring Henry Krauss and Stacia Napierkowska, and Madame Sans-Gêne, in which

Réjane reprised her celebrated performance in Victorien Sardou's play of twenty years

before. Gaumont contributed a film from Feuillade's Vie telle qu'elle est series, La Tare

('The fault'), starring Renée Carl, which headlined the programme inaugurating the

Gaumont-Palace. Based on its past success, Éclair banked on Jasset's adaptation of Léon

Sazie's popular serial crime novel Zigomar, starring Arquillière as a master criminal who

could also be read as a ruthless capitalist entrepreneur.

Over the next few years, feature-length films became the principal weekly attraction on

French cinema programmes. Film d'Art, for instance, convinced Sarah Bernhardt to

reprise one of her more famous roles in La Dame aux camélias ('The lady of the

camellias', 1912), which led to her performance in Louis Mercanton's independent

production of Queen Elizabeth ( 1912) and to a hugely successful roadshow presentation

in the USA. Whereas these two films relied on an old-fashioned tableau style of

representation, Capellani skilfully integrated a wide range of representational strategies in

perhaps the best, and certainly the most exhibited, French historical film, SCAGL's

twelve-reel Les Misérables ('The wretched', 1912), again with Krauss. Most feature-

length films, however, now took on contemporary subjects. A former playwright and

theatre director, Camille de Morlhon proved adept at imitating the pre-war boulevard

melodrama, as in his Valetta production of La Broyeuse des cceurs ('The breaker of

hearts', 1913). Éclair, by contrast, continued to trade on its crime series, in Jasset's

Zigomar contre Nick Carter ('Zigomar against Nick Carter', 1912) and Zigomar, peau

d'anguille ('Zigomar the eelskin', 1913), until Gaumont seized control of the genre with

Feuillade's famous Fantômas series (starring René Navarre), which ran to five separate

films between 1913 and 1914. For Gaumont, Perret also directed two 'super-productions',

L'Enfant de Paris ('The child of Paris', 1913) and Roman d'un mousse (A midshipman's

tale', 1914), which neatly combined features of the crime series with others from the

domestic melodrama in narratives involving a lost, threatened child. In fact, L'Enfant de

Paris became one of the first French films to occupy an entire Paris cinema programme.

THE GREAT WAR: COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY

The general mobilization orders in early August 1914 brought all activity in the French

cinema industry to an abrupt halt. Until recently, it has been customary to use the war to

explain the decline of the French-vis-à-vis the American cinema industry. Although there

is some truth to that claim, the French position had been weakening before the war began.

By 1911, for instance, under pressure from MPPC restrictions and the 'independent'

companies' expansion, Pathé's portion of the total film footage released in the USA had

dropped to less than 10 per cent. By the end of 1913, in both numbers of film titles and

total footage in distribution, the French were losing ground to the Americans on their own

home territory. The war simply accelerated a process already well under way, and its most

devastating effect, other than cutting off production, was severely to restrict the export

market on which the French companies so heavily depended for distributing their films.

Although Pathé, Gaumont, Éclair, and Film d'Art all resumed production in early 1915,

wartime restrictions on capital and material forced them to operate at a much reduced

level and to rerelease popular pre-war films. Furthermore, they faced an 'invasion' of

imported American and Italian films which quickly filled French cinemas, one of the few

entertainment venues to reopen and operate on a regular basis. And many of those films

were distributed by new companies, some with American backing. First came a wave of

Keystone comedies, most of them distributed by Western Imports/ Jacques Haik, which

had become a crucial foreign distributor just before the war. By the summer and autumn,

through Western Imports and Adam, the films of Charlie Chaplin (nicknamed Charlot)

were the rage everywhere. Next came Les Mystères de New York ('The mysteries of New

York'), a compilation of Pearl White's ' first two serials, produced by Pathé's American

affiliate and distributed by Pathé in France, and its only rival in popularity was the Italian

spectacular Cabiria ( 1914). By 1916, through Charles Mary and Monat-Film, it was the

turn of Triangle films, especially the Westerns of William S. Hart (nicknamed Rio Jim),

and Famous Players adaptations such as Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat ( 1915)), which ran

for six months at the Select cinema in Paris.

The 'tableau': Sarah Bernhardt in Louis Mercanton's Queen Elizaveth ( 1912)

Despite contributing to the onslaught of American films, as well as losing critical

personnel like Capellani and Linder to the USA, Pathé remained a major distributor of

French product. Not only did the company support feature-length productions from

SCAGL (Leprince, Monca) and Valetta (Morlhon), but it sought out new film-makers,

notably the famous theatre director André Antoine. Pathé also provided financial backing

to Film d'Art, where Henri Pouctal was joined by young Abel Gance. Gaumont, by

contrast, had to cut back its production schedule, especially after Perret left to work in the

USA. Yet it maintained a strong presence in the industry, largely through Feuillade's

popular, long-running serials as well as its circuit of cinemas (the second largest after

Pathé's). Although continuing to produce films, Éclair never fully recovered from the

double blow of the war and a fire that destroyed its American studio and laboratories in

April 1914. Eventually, the company reorganized into smaller components, the most

important devoted to processing film stock and manufacturing camera equipment: Éclair's

camera, for instance, competed with Debrie's 'Parvo' and Bell & Howell's for dominance

in the world market. Eclipse survived largely on the strength of its new film-making team,

Mercanton and René Hervil. In spite of the odds, independent production companies

actually increased in number, and some (those of André Hugon, Jacques de Baroncelli,

and Germaine Dulac) even flourished. That they could succeed under such conditions was

due, in large part, to the relatively widespread distribution their films had in France,

through AGC or especially Aubert, whose circuit of cinemas continued to expand.

The French films available to spectators between 1915 and 1918 were somewhat different

from before. Perhaps because it was now difficult for the French to laugh at themselves,

at least as they had been accustomed to, the once prolific comic series almost

disappeared. Pathé kept up the Rigadin series, but with fewer titles; Gaumont went on

making Bout-de-Zan films and then concocted a series with Marcel Levesque. Production

of large-scale historical films was also curtailed, unless they were conceived within a

serial format, as was Film d'Art's Le Comte de MonteCristo ('The Count of Monte-Cristo',

1917-18), directed by Pouctal and starring Léon Mathot. Given French budget restrictions

and the success of Pearl White's films, the serial became a staple of production, especially

for Gaumont. There, Feuillade turned out one twelve-episode film per year, returning to

the crime serial in Les Vampires ('The Vampires', 1915-16), then shifting to focus on a

detective hero (played by René Cresté) in Judex ( 1917) and La Nouvelle Mission de

Judex ('Judex's new mission', 1918). Otherwise, patriotic melodramas were de rigueur, at

least for the first two years of the war: perhaps the most publicized were Pouctal's Alsace

( 1915), starring Réjane, and Mercanton and Hervil's Mères françaises ('French mothers',

1916), which posed Bernhardt at Joan of Arc's statue before the ruined Rheims cathedral.

Soon these gave way, however, to more conventional melodramas and adaptations drawn

from the pre-war boulevard theatre of Bataille, Bernstein, and Kistemaeckers. Many of

these films were now devoted to women's stories, in acknowledgement of their dominant

presence in cinema audiences and of their ideological significance on the 'home front'

during the war. Moreover, they gave unusual prominence to female stars: to Mistinguett,

for instance, in such Hugon films as Fleur de Paris ('Flower of Paris', 1916), Grandais in

Mercanton and Hervil's Suzanne series, and Maryse Dauvray in Morlhon films such as

Marise ( 1917). But most prominent of all,. between 1916 and 1918, in more than a dozen

films directed by Monca and Leprince for SCAGL, was the boulevard actress Gabrielle

Robinne.

Out of such melodramas developed the most advanced strategies of representation and

narration in France, particularly in what Gance polemically called 'psychological' films.

Some, like Gaumont's one-reel Têtes de femme, femmes de tête ('Women's heads, wise

women', 1916), directed by Jacques Feyder exclusively in close shots, nearly passed

unnoticed. But others were celebrated by Émile Vuillermoz in Le Temps and by Colette

and Louis Delluc in a new weekly trade journal, Le Film. The most important were

Gance's own Le Droit à la vie ('The right to life', 1916) and especially Mater Dolorosa

( 1917), both much indebted to The Cheat and starring Emmy Lynn. Through unusual

lighting, framing, and editing strategies, Mater Dolorosa seemed to revolutionize the

stylistic conventions of the domestic melodrama, perhaps most notably in the way

everyday objects, such as a white window curtain or a fallen black veil, took on added

significance through singular framing (or magnification) and associational editing. These

strategies were shared by a related group of 'realist' melodramas which Delluc saw as

influenced by certain Triangle films but which also derived from an indigenous French

tradition. Here, Antoine's adaptations of Le Coupable ( 1917) and Les Travailleurs de la

mer ('Workers of the sea', 1918) were exemplary, especially in their location shooting

(one on the outskirts of Paris, the other on the coast of Brittany). But Delluc also drew

attention to the photogénie of the peasant landscapes in Baroncelli's Le Retour aux

champs ('Return to the fields', 1918) as well as certain factory scenes in Henri Roussel's

L'Âme du bronze ('The bronze soul', 1918), one of Eclair's last films. Both kinds of

melodrama would provide the basis for some of the best French films after the war.

'LES ANNÉES FOLLES': FRENCH CINEMA REVIVED

By the end of the war, the French cinema industry confronted a crisis aptly summed up by

posters advertising Mundus-Film (distributors for Selig, Goldwyn, and First National): a

cannon manned by American infantrymen fired one film title after another into the centre

of a French target. According to La Cinématographie française (which soon became the

leading trade journal), for every 5,000 metres of French films presented weekly in France

there were 25,000 metres of imported films, mostly American. Sometimes French films

made up little more than 10 per cent of what was being screened on Paris cinema

programmes. As Henri Diamant-Berger, the publisher of Le Film, bluntly put it, France

was in danger of becoming a 'cinematographic colony' of the United States. How would

the French cinema survive and, if it did, Delluc asked, how would it be French?

The industry's response to this crisis was decidedly mixed over the course of the next

decade. The production sector underwent a paradoxical series of metamorphoses. The

established companies, for instance, either chose or were forced to beat a retreat. In 1918

Pathé-Frères reorganized as Pathé-Cinéma, which soon shut down SCAGL and sold off

its foreign exchanges, including the American affiliate. Two years later, another

reorganization made Pathé-Cinéma responsible for making and marketing apparatuses

and film stock and set up a new company, Pathé-Consortium (over which Charles Pathé

lost control), which rashly began investing in big-budget 'superproductions' that soon

resulted in staggering financial losses. After briefly underwriting 'Séries Pax' films,

Gaumont gradually withdrew from production, a move that accelerated with Feuillade's

death in 1925. Film d'Art also reduced its production schedule as its chief producers and

directors left to set up their own companies. Only the emergence of a 'cottage industry' of

small production companies during the early 1920s provided a significant counter to this

trend. Joining those film-makers already having quasi-independent companies of their

own, for instance, were Perret (returning from the USA), DiamantBerger, Gance, Feyder,

Delluc, Léon Poirier, Julien Duvivier, René Clair, and Jean Renoir. Even larger companies

were established by Louis Nalpas, who left Film d'Art to construct a studio at Victorine

(near Nice), by Marcel L'Herbier, who left Gaumont to found Cinégraphic as an

alternative atelier for himself and other independents, and by a Russian émigré film

colony which took over Pathé's Montreuil studio, first as Films Ermolieffand then as

Films Albatros. The two other principal producers were the veteran Aubert and a

newcomer, Jean Sapène. Based on an alliance with Film d'Art, Aubert built up a

consortium which, by 1923-4, included half a dozen quasi-independent film-makers.

Sapène, the publicity editor at Le Matin, took over a small company named Cinéromans,

hired Nalpas as his excutive producer, and set up an efficient production schedule of

historical serials to be distributed by Pathé-Consortium. So successful were those serials

that Sapène was able to assume control of and revitalize Pathé-Consortium, with

Cinéromans as its new production base.

Although French production increased to 130 feature films by 1922, that figure was far

below the number produced by either the American or German cinema industries, and

French films still comprised a small percentage of cinema programmes. To improve its

position, the industry embarked on a strategy of co-producing 'international' films,

especially through alliances with Germany. This came after earlier repeated failures to

create alliances with the American cinema industry or to exploit American stars such as

Sessue Hayakawa and Fanny Ward; it was also impelled by Paramount's bold move to

launch its own production schedule in Paris, resulting in such box-office hits as Perret's

'Americanized' version of Madame Sans-Gêne ( 1925), starring Gloria Swanson. Pathé,

for instance, joined a new European consortium financed by the German Hugo Stinnes

and the Russian émigré Vladimir Wengeroff (Vengerov), which initially backed Gance's

proposed six-part film of NapoLéon and, through Ciné-France, managed by Noé Bloch

(formerly of Albatros), underwrote Fescourt's four-part adaptation of Les Misérables

( 1925) and Victor Tourjansky's Michel Strogoff ( 1926). That consortium collapsed,

however, when Stinnes's sudden death exposed an incredible level of debt. Further

French-German alliances were then curtailed by heavy American investment, through the

Dawes Plan, in the German cinema industry. The results of this co-production strategy

were mixed. Although generally profitable, such films required huge budgets which,

coupled with a high rate of inflation in France, reduced the French level of production to

just fifty-five films in 1925 -- drying up funds for small production companies and

driving most independent film-makers into contract work with the dominant French

producers.

During the last half of the decade, every major French production company went through

changes in management and orientation. After losing its Russian émigré base, Albatros

secured the services of Feyder and Clair to direct films (especially comedies) that were

more specifically French in character. Although Aubert himself began to take a less active

role, his company's production level remained strong, especially through contracts with

Film d'Art, Duvivier, and a new film-making team, Jean BenoîtLévy and Marie Epstein.

Cinéromans launched a series of 'Films de France' features (by Dulac and Pierre

Colombier, among others) to complement its serials; but when Sapène himself took over

Nalpas's position as executive producer, the company's output generally began to suffer.

Joining these companies were four others, all either financed by Russian émigré money or

associated with Paramount. In 1923 Jacques Grinieff provided an enormous sum to the

Société des Films Historiques, whose grandiose scheme was 'to render visually the whole

history of France'. Its first production, Raymond Bernard's Le Miracle des loups ('The

miracle of the wolves'), premièred at the Paris Opéra and went on to become the most

popular film of 1924. In 1926-7 Bernard Natan, director of a film-processing company

and publicity agency with connections to Paramount, purchased an Éclair studio at Épinay

and constructed another in Montmartre in order to produce films by Perret, Colombier,

Marco de Gastyne, and others. At the same time, Robert Hurel, a French producer for

Paramount, founded Franco-Film, wooing Perret away from Natan after La Femme hue

('The naked woman', 1926) to deliver a string of hits starring Louise Lagrange, the new

'Princess of the French Cinema'. Finally, out of the ashes of Ciné-France arose the Société

Générale des Films, which drew on Grinieff's immense fortune to complete Gance's

NapoLéon ( 1927) and finance Alexandre Volkoff's Casanova ( 1927) and Carl Dreyer's

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc ('The Passion of Joan of Arc', 1928). Against this tide of

consolidation, a few lone figures maintained a tenacious, but marginal, independence,

among them Jean Epstein and especially Pierre Braunberger (the former publicity director

for Paramount), whose Néo-Film offered a 'laboratory' for young film-makers.

During the 1920s the distribution sector of the industry faced an even more severe

challenge. One after another, the major American companies either set up their own

offices in Paris or strengthened their alliances with French distributors. In 1920 came

Paramount and Fox-Film; in 1921 it was the turn of United Artists and First National; in

1922 they were joined by Universal, Metro, and Goldwyn, the latter two signing

exclusive distribution contracts, respectively, with Aubert and Gaumont. That this could

happen so easily was due not only to the Americans' economic power but also to the

French government's inability either to impose substantial import duties on American

films or to legislate a quota system restricting their numbers vis-à-vis French films. The

American success stood in stark contrast to the French film industry's failure to rebuild its

own export markets lost in the war. In the United States, for instance, no more than a

dozen French films were exhibited annually from 1920 to 1925, and few reached cinemas

outside New York. By the end of the decade, the number had increased only slightly. The

situation was different in Germany, where a good percentage of French production was

distributed between 1923 and 1926, in contrast to the far fewer German films imported

into France. That too changed, however, when ACE began distributing German films in

Paris, bypassing French firms altogether. By 1927 the number of German titles released in

France surpassed the total production of the French cinema industry.

That the French distribution market did not capitulate completely to the Americans and

Germans was due in large part to Pathé-Consortium. Whatever its internal problems and

shifts in production, Pathé served, much as it did before and during the war, as the major

outlet not only for its own product but also for that of smaller companies and independent

producers. Cinéromans serials played a decisive role precisely at the moment when, in

1922-3, fresh from their conquest of the British cinema market and just before their

intervention in Germany, American companies seemed ready to impose a block-booking

system of film distribution within France. According to Fescourt, the serials functioned as

a counter system of block booking in that, for at least nine months, they guaranteed

exhibitors 'a long series of weeks of huge returns from a faithful public hooked on the

formula'. Having taken over the contracts of AGC and negotiated others with Film d'Art

and independents such as Feyder and Baroncelli, by 1924-5 Aubert complemented Pathé

efforts as the second largest French distributor. Yet, even though other companies

emerged, such as Armor (to distribute Albatros films), there were never enough

independent French distributors, nor was there a consortium or network which could

distribute the great number of independent French films. As the decade wore on, the

French resistance to foreign domination began to weaken: Gaumont came under the

control of MGM, while Aubert and Armor gradually moved within the orbit of ACE.

However successful Pathé, Aubert, and others had been, the Americans and Germans

secured a foothold within the French cinema industry at the crucial moment of the

transition to sound films.

Compared to the rest of the industry, the exhibition sector remained relatively secure

throughout the 1920s. The number of cinemas rose from 1,444 at the end of the war to

2,400 just two years later and nearly doubled again to 4,200 by 1929. At the same time,

box-office receipts increased exponentially, even taking into account a short period of

high inflation, going from 85 million francs in 1923 to 230 million in 1929. This occurred

despite the fact that the vast majority of French cinemas were independently, even

individually, owned (the figure was perhaps as high as 80 per cent), few of those had a

capacity of 750 seats or more, and less than half operated on a daily basis. That the

exhibition sector did so well was due partly to the enormous popularity of American

films, from Robin Hood (with Douglas Fairbanks) to Ben-Hur. Yet French films, and not

only the serials, also contributed: Feyder's costly L'Atlatitide ( 1921), for instance, played

at the prestigious Madeleine cinema for a whole year. Equally important, however, the

luxury cinemas or palaces, most of them constructed or renovated by Aubert, Gaumont,

and Pathé as 'flagships' for their circuits, generated an unusually high volume of receipts.

There were Aubert-Palaces in nearly every major French city as well as the 2,000-seat

Tivoli in Paris. As its interests shifted to distribution and exhibition, Gaumont acquired

control of the Madeleine, which, with the Gaumont-Palace, served to anchor its Paris

circuit. Pathé renovated the Pathé-Palace into the Caméo, constructed the Empire and

Impérial, and formed an alliance with a new circuit in the capital, Lutetia-Fournier. Only a

few Paris palaces remained independent: the Salle Marivaux, constructed in 1919 by

Edmond Benoît-Lévy, and the Ciné Max-Linder. Yet even the exhibition sector was not

safe from American intervention. In 1925 Paramount began buying or building luxury

cinemas in half a dozen major cities, culminating in the 2,000-seat Paramount-Palace,

which opened in Paris for the 1927 Christmas season. By that time, the major French

cinemas had long established a programme schedule which featured a single film en

exclusivité along with a serial episode and/or a newsreel or short documentary. The

Paramount-Palace introduced the concept of the double-bill programme. Furthermore, it

was prepared to spend lavishly on advertising; within less than a year it was taking in

nearly 10 per cent of the total cinema receipts in Paris.

Although Delluc abhorred them, serials were a distinctive component of the French

cinema, remaining popular well into the late 1920s. Initially, they followed the pattern

established by Feuillade during the war. In TihMinh ( 1919) and Barrabas ( 1920),

Feuillade himself returned to criminal gangs operating with almost metaphysical power in

a world described by Francis Lacassin as a 'tourist's nightmare of exotic locales'. Volkoff's

adaptation of Jules Mary's La Maison du mystère ('The house of mystery', 1922) focused

instead on a textile industrialist (Ivan Mosjoukine) falsely imprisoned for a crime and

forced to exonerate himself in a series of deadly combats with a devilish rival. Another

pattern began to develop out of films like Diamant-Berger's Les Trois Mousquetaires

('The three musketeers', 1921) and Fescourt's Mathias Sandorf ( 1921): the costume or

historical adventure story which Sapène and Nalpas seized on as the basis for the

Cinéromans serials. War heroes and adventurer-brigands from the period either before or

after the French Revolution were especially popular. Fescourt's Mandrin ( 1924), for

instance, depicted the exploits of a Robin Hood figure (Mathot) against the landowners

and tax collectors of the Dauphiné region, while Leprince's Fanfan la Tulipe ( 1925)

staged one threat after another to an orphan hero (nearly executed in the Bastille) who

finally discovered he was of 'noble blood'. By resurrecting a largely aristocratic society

and celebrating a valiant, oppositional hero, who both belonged to a supposedly glorious

past and figured the transition to a bourgeois era, the Cinéromans serials also played a

significant role, after the war, in addressing a collective ideological demand to restore and

redefine France.

That ideological project also partly determined the industry's heavy investment in

historical films. Here, too, the often nostalgic resurrection of past moments of French

glory -- and tragedy -- contributed to the process of national restoration. Le Miracle des

loups, for instance, returned to the late fifteenth century, when a sense of national unity

was first being forged. Here, the bitter conflict between Louis XI (Charles Dullin) and his

brother Charles the Bold was mediated and resolved, according to legend, by Jeanne

Hachette -- and ultimately by a code of suffering and sacrifice. Espousing a similar code,

Roussel's Violettes impériales ('Imperial violets', 1924) transformed the singer, Raquel

Meller, from a simple flower-seller into a Paris Opéra star and a confidante of Empress

Eugénie, all within the luxurious splendour of the Second Empire.

Later French films tended to focus either on one of two periods of French history or else

on subjects involving tsarist Russia. Some took up the same era favoured by the

Cinéromans serials, as in Les Misérables or Fescourt's remake of Monte Cristo ( 1929).

Others followed the example of Le Miracle des loups, as in Gastyne's La Merveilleuse

Vie de Jeanne d'Arc ('The marvellous life of Joan of Arc', 1928), starring Simone

Genevois, or Renoir's Le Tournoi ('The tournament', 1928). The most impressive of the

French subjects were Napoléon and La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. In Napoléon, Gance

conceived young Bonaparte ( Albert Dieudonné) as the legendary fulfilment of the

Revolution, a kind of Romantic artist in apotheosis, which others like Léon Moussinac

read as proto-Fascist. Everyone agreed, however, on the audacity of Gance's technical

innovations-the experiments with camera movement and multiple screen formats, most

notably in the famous triptych finale. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, by contrast, deviated

radically from the genre's conventions. Dreyer focused neither on medieval pageantry nor

on Joan's military exploits, showcased in La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, but on the

spiritual and political conflicts marking her last day of life. Based on records of the Rouen

trial, Dreyer's film simultaneously documented Falconetti's ordeal playing Jeanne and

created a symbolic progression of close-up faces, all within an unusually disjunctive

spacetime continuum.

Several of the most successful historical productions, however, permitted the Russian

émigrés to celebrate-and sometimes criticize -- the country from which they had fled.

Michel Strogoff, the Impérial cinema's inaugural film, adapted Jules Verne's adventure

novel about a tsarist courier who successfully carries out a dangerous mission in Siberia.

By contrast, Bernard's Le Joueur d'échecs ('The chess player', 1926), which set box-office

records at the Salle Marivaux, represented the triumph of Polish independence from the

Russian monarchy, just prior to the French Revolution. More fantastical in style than

either was Casanova, one of whose episodic series of adventures had Casanova meet and

befriend Catherine the Great. All three of these films showcased magnificent set décors

and costumes (by either Ivan Lochakoff and Boris Bilinsky or Robert Mallet-Stevens and

Jean Perrier) as well as marvellous location shooting (by L.-H. Burel, J.-P. Mundviller,

and others), whether in Latvia, Poland, or Venice.

The boulevard melodrama continued to serve as an important asset to the industry for

several years after the war. Tristan Bernard's plays, for instance, helped to secure his son

Raymond's initial reputation as a film-maker. The more 'artistically' inclined film-makers

also continued to work within the bourgeois milieu of the domestic melodrama, extending

the advances made during the war, often by means of original scenarios, in what Dulac

was the first to call 'impressionist films'. In J'accuse ('I accuse', 1919) and La Roue ('The

wheel', 1921), Gance experimented further with elliptical point-of-view shot sequences,

different forms of rhythmic montage (including rapid montage), and patterns of rhetorical

figuring through associational editing. Dulac did likewise in a series of films which

focused predominantly on women, from La Cigarette ( 1919) to La Mort du soleil ('The

death of the sun', 1922) and especially La Souriante Madame Beudet ('Smiling Madame

Beudet', 1923), whose central character was inescapably trapped in a provincial bourgeois

marriage. Perhaps the high point of this experimentation came in L'Herbier's 'exotic' El

Dorado ( 1921), which deployed a remarkable range of framing and editing strategies

(along with a specially composed score) to evoke the subjective life of a Spanish cabaret

dancer, Sybilla (Eve Francis), and culminated backstage in a stunning 'dance of death'.

By the middle of the decade, the bases for film melodrama had shifted from the theatre to

fiction, and across several genres. Some followed the path of L'Atlantide, drawn from a

popular Pierre Benoit novel, by adapting either 'exotic' Arabian Nights tales or stories of

romance and adventure in the French colonies, usually in North Africa. The latter were

especially popular in films as diverse as Gastyne's La Châtelaine du Liban ('The

chatelaine of the Lebanon', 1926) and Renoir's Le Bled ('The wasteland', 1929). Others

exploited the French taste for fantasy, particularly after the success of 'Séries Pax' films

such as Poirier's Le Penseur ('The thinker', 1920). These ranged from Mosjoukine's

satirical fable Le Brasier ardent) ('The burning brazier', 1923) or L'Herbier's modernist

fantasy Feu Mathias Pascal ('The late Mathias Pascal', 1925), to refurbished féeries,

Clair's Le Fantôme du Moulin Rouge ('The ghost of the Moulin Rouge', 1925), or tales of

horror, Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher ('The Fall of the House of Usher', 1928).

The major development in the melodrama genre, however, was the modern studio

spectacular, a product of the cultural internationalism which now characterized the urban

nouveau riche in much of Europe and a new target of French investment in international

co-productions. According to Gérard Talon, these films represented the 'good life' of a

new generation and helped establish what was modern or à la mode in fashion, sport,

dancing, and manners. Perfectly congruent with the ideology of consumer capitalism, this

'good life' was played out in milieux which tended to erase the specificity of French

culture. Elements of the modern studio spectacular can be seen as early as Perret's

Koenigsmark ( 1923), but the defining moment came in 1926 with a return to theatrical

adaptations in L'Herbier's Le Vertige ('Vertigo') and Perret's La Femme nue, with their

fashionable resorts and chic Paris restaurants. Thereafter, the modern studio spectacular

came close to dominating French production. Yet some films cut against the grain of its

pleasures, from L'Herbier's deliberately 'avant-garde' extravaganza, L'Inhumaine ('The

inhuman one', 1924) to his updated adaptation of Zola, L'Argent ('Money', 1928), whose

highly original strategies of camera movement and editing helped to critique its wealthy

characters and milieux. A similar critique marked Epstein's 6½ x 11 ( 1927) and especially

his small-budget film La Glace à trois faces ('The three-sided mirror', 1927), which

intricately embedded four interrelated stories within just three reels.

The 'realist' melodrama, by contrast, sustained its development throughout the decade and

remained decidedly'French'. Two things in particular distinguished these films. First, they

usually celebrated specific landscapes or milieux, as spatial co-ordinates delineating the

'inner life' of one or more characters and, simultaneously, as cultural fields for tourists.

Second, those landscapes or milieux were divided between Paris and the provinces,

privileging the picturesque of certain geographical areas and cultures, often tinged with

nostalgia. The Brittany coast provided the subject for films from L'Herbier's L'Homme du

large ('The man of the high seas', 1920) and Baroncelli's Pêcheur d'Islande ('Iceland

Fisherman', 1924) to Epstein's exquisite 'documentary' Finis terrae ( 1929), and Jean

Grémillon's extraordinarily harrowing Gardiens du phare ('Lighthouse keepers', 1929).

The French Alps dominated Feyder's exceptional Visages d'enfants ('Children's faces',

1924), while the Morvan provided a less imposing backdrop for Duvivier's Poil de carotte

('Ginger', 1926). Barge life on French canals and rivers was lovingly detailed in Epstein's

La Belle Nivernaise ('The beautiful Nivernaise', 1924), Renoir's La Fille de l'eau ('Water

girl', 1925), and Grémillon's Maldone ( 1928). The agricultural areas of western, central,

and southern France were the subject of Feuillade's Vendémiaire ( 1919), Antoine's La

Terre ('The land', 1920), Robert Boudrioz's L'Âtre ('The hearth', 1922), Delluc's

L'Inondation ('The flood', 1924), and Poirier's La Brière ( 1924).

Another group of 'realist' films focused on the 'popular' in the socio-economic margins of

modern urban life in Paris, Marseilles, or elsewhere. Here, for flâneurs of the cinema,

were the iron mills and working-class slums of Pouctal's Travail ('Work', 1919), the

claustrophobic sailor's bar of Delluc's Fièvre ('Fever', 1921), the street markets of Feyder's

Crainquebille ( 1922), and the bistros and cheap amusement parks of Epstein's Cōur fidèle

('Faithful heart', 1923). Although their numbers decreased during the latter half of the

decade, several achieved a remarkable sense of verisimilitude, notably Duvivier's Le

Mariage de Mlle Beulemans ('The marriage of Mlle Beulemans', 1927), shot in Brussels,

and the Benoît-Lévy/Epstein production of Peau de pêche ('Peach-skin', 1928), which

juxtaposed the dank, dirty streets of Montmartre to the healthy air of a Charmont-sur-

Barbuise farm. Perhaps the most 'avantgarde' of these later films were Dmitri Kirsanoff 's

brutally poetic Ménilmontant ( 1925), with Nadia Sibirskaia, and Alberto Cavalcanti's

documentary-like stories of disillusionment and despair, Rien que les heures ('Only the

hours', 1926) and En rade ('Sea fever', 1927).

One last genre, the comedy, also remained solidly grounded in French society. The 1920s

at first seemed no less inauspicious for French film comedy than had the war years. Le

Petit Café ('The little café, 1919), Bernard's adaptation of his father's popular boulevard

comedy, starring Max Linder (recently returned from the USA), was a big success, yet

failed to generate further films. There was Robert Saidreau's series of vaudeville

comedies, of course, and Feuillade's charming adaptation Le Gamin de Paris ('The

Parisian boy', 1923), but not until 1924 did a significant renewal of French film comedy

get under way, ironically from the Russian émigré company Albatros. The initial model of

comedy construction was to update the figure of the naïve provincial come to the

sophisticated capital, as in Volkoff's Les Ombres qui passent ('Passing shadows', 1924).

Another was to transpose American gags and even characters into an atmosphere of

French gaiety, as in the Albatros series starring Nicholas Rimsky, or in Cinéromans's

Amour et carburateur ('Love and carburettor', 1926), directed by Colombier and starring

Albert Préjean. The real accolades, however, went to Clair for his brilliant Albatros

adaptations of Eugène Labiche, Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat,

1927) and Les Deux Timides ('The timid ones', 1928), with ensemble casts featuring

Préjean, Pierre Batcheff, and Jim Gerald. Accentuating the original's comedy of

situations, Clair's first film thoroughly mixed up a wedding couple and an adulterous one

to produce an unrelenting attack on the belle ipoque bourgeoisie through a delightful

pattern of acute visual observations. Almost as successful was Feyder's Les Nouveaux

Messieurs ('The new gentlemen', 1928), which provoked the ire of the French

government, not for its satire of a labour union official (played by Präjean), but for its so-

called disrespectful depiction of the National Chamber nto an exuberant social satire,

pitting a blithely assured but ineffectual bourgeois master against his bighearted,

bumbling servant, played with grotesque audacity by Michel Simon.

By the end of the decade, the French cinema industry seemed to evidence less and less

interest in producing what Delluc would have called specifically French films. Whereas

the historical film was frequently reconstructing past eras elsewhere, the modern studio

spectacular was constructing an international no man's land of conspicuous consumption

for the nouveau riche. Only the 'realist' film and the comedy presented the French

somewhat tels qu'ils sont -- if not as they might have wanted to see themselves -- the one

by focusing on the marginal, the other by invoking mockery. With the development of the

sound film, both genres would contribute even more to restoring a sense of 'Frenchness' to

the French cinema. Yet would that 'Frenchness'be any less imbued with nostalgia than was

the charming repertoire of signs, gestures, and songs that Maurice Chevalier was about to

make so popular in the USA?

Bibliography

Abel, Richard ( 1984), French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929.

--- ( 1988), French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 19071929.

--- ( 1993), The Cinf Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914.

Bordwell, David ( 1980), French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory and

Film Style.

Chirat, Raymond, and Icart, Roger (eds.) ( 1984), Catalogue des films français de long

métrage: films de fiction, 1919-1929.

--- and Le Eric Roy (eds.) ( 1994), Le Cinéma français, 1911-1920.

Clair, René ( 1972), Cinema Yesterday and Today.

Delluc, Louis ( 1919), Cinéma et cie.

Epstein, Jean ( 1921), Bonjour cinéma.

Guibbert, Pierre (ed.) ( 1985), Les Premiers Ans du cinéma français.

Hugues, Philippe d', and Martin, Michel ( 1986), Le cinéma français: le muet.

Mitry, Jean ( 1967), Histoire du cinéma, i: 1895-1914.

--- ( 1969), Histoire du cinéma, ii: 1915-1923.

--- ( 1973), Histoire du cinéma, iii: 1923-1930.

Moussinac, Léon ( 1929), Panoramique du cinéma.

Sadoul, Georges ( 1951), Histoire générale du cinéma, iii: Le cinéma devient un art, 1909-

1920 (l'avant-guerre).

--- ( 1974), Histoire générale du cinéma, iv: Le cinéma devient un art, 1909-1920 (La

Première Guerre Mondiale).

--- ( 1975a), Histoire générale du cinéma, v: L'Art muet (1919-1929).

--- ( 1975b), Histoire générale du cinéma, vi: L'Art muet (1919-1929).

Saccard (Alcover) and Sandorf (Brigitte Helm) in Marcel L'Herbier 's L'Argent ( 1929)

Séverin-Mars in Abel Gance 's La Roue ( 1921)

Max Linder (1882-1925)

Max Linder was one of the most gifted comic artists in the history of the performing arts.

Inscribing a photograph to him in the early 1920s. Charlie Chaplin called him 'The

Professor-to whom I owe everything'; and there is no doubt that Linder's style and

technique were a great influence on Chaplin, as indeed upon practically every other

screen comedian who followed him, whether or not they were aware of it.Born Gabriel

Leveille to a farming family near Bordeaux. Linder was stage-struck from childhood. He

studied at the Bordeaux Conservatoire, and acted in Bordeaux, and later in Paris with the

company of Ambigu. In 1905 he began to augment his salary by working by day at the

Pathé studios. The shame of working in moving pictures was concealed by using the nom

d'art Max Linder. In the course of two years he made his mark as a light comedian; and

when Pathé's first great comedy star André Deed defected to the Itala Studios in Turin,

Linder starred in his own series. The first of these films were tentative, but during 1910

the eventual max character evolved rapidly.While the other comic stars of the period were

generally manic and grotesque, Linder adopted the character of a svelte and handsome

young boulevardier, with sleek hair, trimmed moustache, and impeccably shiny silk hat

which survived all catastrophes. Max was resourceful and generally discovered some

ingenious way out of the many scrapes in which he found himself, usually as a result of

his incorrigible gallantry to pretty ladies. Linder perceived the comedy in the contrast

between Max's debonair elegance and the ludicrous or humiliating adventures which

befell him.Despite his stage training Linder was acutely conscious of the specific nature

of the cinema, recognizing the possibility it provided for subtlety of expression. He had

the gift of naturalness. Every action was in essence true to life. We laugh at his

predicaments because we know just how he feels.Inexhaustibly inventive, Linder had a

talent for devising endless variations upon some basic theme. In the sublime Max prend

un bain ( 1910), he apparently simple process of taking a bath brings problems that

escalate until Max, still in his bath, is carried through the streets shoulder high by a

solemn cortège of policemen. With exquisite sang-froid Max leans out and proffers his

hand to two passing ladies of his acquaintance.Max reached the peak of his popularity in

the years just preceding the First World War, when his international tours to make

personal appearances became royal progresses. His health was permanently impaired by

grave injuries he received fighting at the front during the war. He accepted a contract

from the Essanay Company to go to America to replace Chaplin. The failure of his films

there (largely due to Essanay's ugly attempts to use him to denigrate Chaplin, with whom

he was personally friendly) was a further blow to his spirits.Encouraged by Chaplin he

returned to America in 1921, and made three features which remain his masterpieces:

Seven Years' Bad Luck ( 1921), Be my Wife ( 1921), and a genial parody of Douglas

Fairbanks's The Three Musketeers, The Three Must-Get-Theres ( 1922). When these films

too were coolly received. Max returned to France only to find his reputation even there

eclipsed by Chaplin. He fell victime to the comedian's traditional melancholia.Despite this

he continued to work. He made an eerie horror-comedy, Au secours! ( 1923) with Abel

Gance, and went to Vienna to shoot Le Roi du cirque ( 1924). His comic brilliance was

undiminished, but his life was rapidly moving into tragedy.In 1922 he had become

infatuated with a 17 year old, Ninette Peters, whom he eventually married. Gravely

disturbed, With periods in a sanatorium, Max became prey to a pathological jealousy. He

and Ninette were both found dead in a hotel room on the morning of 1 November 1925.

His daughter Maud Linder concludes that he persuaded Ninette to take a soporific, and

then cut her veins and his own.DAVID ROBINSON

SELECT FILMOGRAPHY

La Première Sortie d'un collégien ( 1905); Les Débuts d'un patineur ( 1907); Max prend

un bain ( 1910): Les Débuts du Max au cinéma ( 1910); Max victime de quinquina(

1911); Max veut faire du théâtre ( 1911); Max professeur du tango ( 1912); Max toréador

( 1912); Max pédicure ( 1914); Le Petit Café ( 1919); Au secours! ( 1923) in USA Max in

a Taxi ( 1917); Be my Wife ( 1921); Seven Years Bad Luck ( 1921); The Three must-Get-

theres ( 1922)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Linder, Maud ( 1992), Les Dieux du cinéma muet: Max Linder.

Mitry, Jean ( 1966), Max Linder.

Robinson, David ( 1969), The Great Funnies: A History of Film Comedy.

Italy: Spectacle and Melodrama

PAOLO CHERCHI USAI

Film production in Italy began relatively late in comparison with other European nations.

The first fiction film -- La presa di Roma, 20 settembre 1870 (The capture of Rome, 20

September 1870'), by Filoteo Alberini-appeared in 1905, by which time France, Germany,

Britain, and Denmark already had in place well developed production infrastructures.

After 1905, however, the rate of production increased dramatically in Italy, so that for the

four years preceding the First World War it took its place as one of the major powers in

world cinema. In the period 1905-31 almost 10,000 films -- of which roughly 1,500 have

survived-were distributed by more than 500 production companies. And whilst it is true

that the majority of these companies had very brief life-spans, and that almost all

entrepreneurial power was concentrated in the hands of perhaps a dozen firms, the figures

nevertheless give a clear indication of the boom in this field in a country which, though

densely populated (almost 33 million in 1901), lagged behind the rest of Europe in terms

of economic development.

The history of early film production in Italy can be divided into two periods: a decade of

expansion ( 1903-14) during which up to two-thirds of the total number of films in the

silent era were made, followed by fifteen years of gradual decline after the sudden

collapse in output, in common with the whole of Europe, during the war. In 1912 an

average of three films a day were released (1,127 in total, admittedly many of them

short); in 1931 only two feature films in the entire year.

BEGINNINGS

The tradition of visual spectacle has deep historical roots in Italy. Aspects of it which are

particularly important to the prehistory of cinema include entertainments in travelling

shows -- from the 'Mondo Niovo' of the late eighteenth century to the nineteenth century

'Megaletoscopio' -- and scientific curiosities (documented by A. Riccò in his 1876 study

Esperienze cromostroboscopiche, 'Chromostroboscopic experiments'). It is in this context

that the first appearance of the 'Cinématographe Lumière' in the Roman photographic

atelier Le Lieure, on 13 March 1896, provoked an excited reaction and this new French

invention spread to Naples, Turin, and gradually to several other cities. Markedly less

success awaited the Chronophotographe Demen´', Robert W. Paul's 'Theatrograph', and

the Edison apparatus.

As local distribution initiatives multiplied, the Société Lumière made its presence felt

thanks to four cameramen: Vittorio Calcina, Francesco Felicetti, Giuseppe Filippi, and

Albert Promio. As well as actualities and scenes from real life, there were also the brief

narrative films of Italo Pacchioni, who built his own camera in 1896 along with his

brother Enrico, and of the variety artist Leopoldo Fregoli, who used the Cinématographe

(renamed the 'Fregoligraph') to reproduce the quick-change impressions that had made

him famous throughout Europe. But these were isolated efforts, which did very little to

contribute towards the setting up of stable, commercially viable projects. For almost ten

years, therefore, the diffusion of cinema in Italy was dependent on sporadic initiatives

taken by travelling performers, by photographers who became amateur managers, and by

owners of variety or café-concert clubs.

It was not until nearly a decade after 1896 that such fragmented elements came together

to create a number of production companies constructed on a more solid base. Some of

these very quickly acquired a pioneering role in their field. In Rome, there was the

Alberini & Santoni studio ( 1905), which changed its name to Cines in April 1906; in

Milan, companies owned by Adolfo Croce and Luca Comerio (the latter became SAFFI-

Comerio in 1908 and then Milano Films in late 1909); in Turin, which was the real capital

of Italian cinema in the period of its creation, Ambrosio ( 1905), Aquila Film founded by

Camillo Ottolenghi ( 1907), Pasquali and Tempo ( 1909), and Carlo Rossi & Co., formed

in 1907 and renamed Itala Film in May 1908 at the behest of Giovanni Pastrone and Carlo

Sciamengo.

NON-FICTION, COMEDY, AND ANCIENT ROME

The French domination of the Italian film market led to a serious crisis in the nascent

home industry as early as 1907. The recently formed companies struggled to find

adequate distribution outlets for their work, and responded by adopting a strategy which

aimed to exploit the popularity enjoyed by three particular genres: historical films,

documentaries, and, above all, comedies, for which demand from exhibitors was growing

at a remarkable pace. Comerio, Ambrosio, Itala, and Cines all developed an aggressive

policy of documentary and reallife film-making, sending specialized film-makers to areas

of natural beauty which had not yet been covered by Pathé, Éclair, and Gaumont, as well

as to areas struck by natural disasters (such as Calabria and Sicily after the 1909

earthquake). Of particular note were Giovanni Vitrotti, who worked for Ambrosio in Italy

and abroad, and Roberto Omegna, who began with Milano Films a career in scientific

documentaries which lasted for several decades. It is not unusual to find in these non-

fiction films interesting elements of technical innovation. In The Island of Rhodes (Tra le

pinete di Rodi, Savoia, 1912) the final view of a shooting cannon transforms this

travelogue into a pretext for colonial propaganda when the film is suddenly flooded with

red, white, and green, the colours of the Italian flag. An unidentified film made by

Ambrosio probably around 1912, and known by the apocryphal title Santa Lucia, has

shots with a split screen divided into several differentsized sectors.

In the field of comedy, the Italian response to the overwhelming influence of the French

was initiated by Giovanni Pastrone, who travelled to Paris in 1908 in order to entice a

well-known actor back to Turin. The two principal candidates, both employed by Pathé,

were Max Linder, who was already on the way up, even if not yet arrived at stardom, and

André Deed (pseudonym of André Chapuis), who had served a brief apprenticeship under

Georges Méliès before moving on to Pathé and immense success in the role of Boireau.

Pastrone chose Deed, changed his nickname to Cretinetti (or Foolshead in Britain and

America), and, from January 1909 onwards, produced a series of around 100 short

comedies, interrupted only by the actor's temporary return to France ( 1912-15), and

closed with the 1921 feature L'uomo meccanico ('The mechanical man', Milano Films).

The main ingredients of the phenomenal world-wide success enjoyed by Deed from 1909

to 1911 were the surreal use of visual tricks and the acceleration of the hectic rhythm

typical of chase comedies. With its madcap, almost hysterical pace, its systematic

destruction of whatever surrounded the action, and its upturned logic, André Deed's work

constitutes an anarchic paradigm of transformation, in the nihilistic sense, of everyday,

urban comedy. His example was followed by every one of the major companies of the

time, creating a gallery of around forty characters of varying talent and fortune. The most

interesting personalities amongst them were the circus artists Ferdinand Guillaume (as

Tontolini for Cines, 191012, and as Polidor for Pasquali, 1912-18), Marcel Fabre (as

Robinet for Ambrosio, 1910-15) and Raymond Fran (Ovaro) (as Kri-Kri for Cines, 1912-

16). They drew heavily on their repertoire of clownery in making film comedies. Some,

such as Kri-Kri, created visual novelties and original situations which were occasionally

upgraded to more complex forms of mise-en-scène.

The development of the third strand in Italian production of this period was based on the

reconstruction of historical settings and characters, from Ancient Greece and Rome to the

Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and, to a lesser extent, the eighteenth century and the

Napoleonic era. The trend towards this sort of production, partly derived from French

models (the company Film d'Arte Italiana was founded by Pathé in 1909), was

immediately successful with Italian audiences, and also encountered favourable reactions

abroad. The success of the new genre became an important cultural phenomenon with the

release of The Fall of Troy ( La caduta di Troia, 1911), directed by Giovanni Pastrone and

Romano L. Borgnetto for Itala Film. Despite its hostile reception by Italian critics, the

film was greeted with unprecedented public approval in Europe and America, inspired by

its spectacular monumental reconstructions of classical architecture, filmed using depth of

field rather than two-dimensional backdrops, and by its unashamed aspiration to artistic

grandeur.

THE POWER AND THE GLORY

Such aspiration to the status of art formed the basis of the most successful period in the

history of Italian silent cinema, which, despite the relatively modest resources available to

its creators, managed to secure a deserved place amongst the great powers of international

production nations between 1911 and 1914. Progress was aided by the support

forthcoming from a new generation of entrepreneurs, with its roots in the aristocracy or in

the world of high finance and big business, who in part took over the role of the pioneers

who had laid the foundations for a stable production system only a few years earlier.

These members of the privileged classes could call upon immense resources in order to

pursue such a prestigious hobby as film-making. But their contribution was not solely

economic in nature. They also brought a certain instinct for patronage and philanthropy,

insisting on the potential of the moving image as an instrument for the moral and cultural

education of a nation which was still in large part illiterate. For good or ill, they provided

the Italian film industry with the entrepreneurial backing which had been strikingly absent

thus far from the spontaneous, dilettante approaches of the first practitioners.

Encouraged by the didactic mission of its backers, the full-length feature film emerged

earlier in Italy than in most other countries. La Gerusalemme liberata (The Crusaders,

Cines, 1911) by Enrico Guazzoni was 1,000 metres long; L'Inferno ( Dante's Inferno,

Milano Films, 1911), directed by Francesco Bertolini and Adolfo Padovan, in

collaboration with Giuseppe De Liguoro, was two years in the making and was

announced as measuring 1,300 metres.

In a short period of time, the trend towards grand spectacle produced two costly films,

both set in Ancient Rome, which were destined to have an enormous impact on the

development of film production: The Last Days of Pompeii ( Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei,

Ambrosio, 1913), directed by Eleuterio Rodolfi, 1,958 metres, with, literally, a cast of

hundreds; and Quo vadis? (Cines, 1913), by Enrico Guazzoni, whose length (2,250 m.)

had only ever been surpassed by the Danish film Atlantis (Nordisk, 1913) by August

Blom (2,280 m. excluding intertitles). The Last Days of Pompeii repeated and by far

exceeded the sensational success in America of The Fall of Troy, so that one American

distributor, George Kleine, was even tempted to start up a production company of his own

-- Photodrama of Italy -along with a large studio at Grugliasco, near Turin. His

courageous venture failed on the outbreak of war, but it illustrates eloquently the power of

attraction exercised by Italian cinema outside Italy in the years leading up to 1914.

The apotheosis of the historical genre was reached with Cabiria (Itala Film, 1914), by

Giovanni Pastrone, a film which symbolizes the zenith of achievement of silent cinema in

Italy. The majestic drama set against the background of the Punic wars between Rome

and Carthage was by a wide margin the most lavish film made in that era. Pastrone, a

gifted but reclusive figure, was the first producer to grasp the need for a sound managerial

attitude to film production. Unlike other producers of the time, his background was

modest: he had started out on a career in bookkeeping, but he came to combine his

businesslike style with genuine artistic vision. He tried out new technical possibilities,

such as a camera for amateurs designed to shoot four separate films using a single length

of 35 mm. film divided into four segments; and 'stereoscopic' and 'natural colour' shooting

which were tried, without success, for Cabiria. He acquired a fund of technical knowledge

for his company by hiring an expert from Pathé whose forte was special effects, Segundo

de Chomón. He reorganized his company in 1910 with the adoption of a rigorous and

efficient set of internal regulations, written out in detail and distributed to all employees.

And finally, he secured a sound financial base thanks to the success of André Deed's

comedies and to a number of 'sensational' films such as Tigris, by Vincenzo C. Dénizot,

produced in 1913 and inspired by the success of the French Fantômas series by Louis

Feuillade. All these elements created for Pastrone the opportunity to develop and extend

formal and expressive fields of research.

one of the first results of this ambition was Padre ('Father', Gino Zaccaria and/or Dante

Testa, 1912), in which Ermete Zacconi, a great theatre actor, appeared in front of the

camera for the first time. The even grander aim of Cabiria was to obtain the collaboration

and support of the most famous intellectual figure of the era, Gabriele D'Annunzio.

DAnnunzio agreed to write the intertitles for the film, and was even credited as its author.

However, beyond its literary echoes and its weighty architectural apparatus, Cabiria offers

stylistic and technological solutions which make it a pioneering, avant-garde work. Above

all, it repeatedly uses long tracking shots which move across the scene. Although these

had already been seen in earlier films, such as, among others, Le Pickpocket mystifié

('The pickpocket bewildered', Pathé, 1911), Sumerki racking shots of Cabiria perform a

crucial narrative and descriptive function, and were filmed on a sophisticated system of

tracks which allowed for remarkably complex camera movements.

With the emergence of the full-length feature, the Italian film industry underwent a

further transformation. In order to make a profit on a smaller number of film shows, the

exhibitors enlarged their halls, ticket prices went up, and so, in turn, did the directors'

pretensions. From a popular spectacle, designed in large part for working-class audiences,

cinema became a middle-class form of entertainment. This new situation accentuated the

competition between companies, whose number grew to excess after 1915, shifting the

centre of production from the north ( Turin and Milan) to Rome and Naples, challenging

the monopoly of the bigger companies, and hampering any further consolidation of the

newly formed production base. The embryonic 'studio system' of the years after 1910 was

thus replaced by a growing fragmentation of the industry.

One effect of this new situation, as in all the other major film-making countries, was the

decline of the documentary and the comic short, which from this moment on became

mere programme-fillers. Conversely, there was a sharp increase in grandiose productions,

which aimed to develop what were held to be the highest of ideals, such as the promotion

of the nationalist spirit or of religious values. In the wake of the success of Quo vadis?,

Enrico Guazzoni emerged as a specialist in historical reconstruction through a series of

monumental dramas set in Ancient Rome, such as Antony and Cleopatra ( Marcantonio e

Cleopatra, Cines, 1913), Julius Caesar ( Cajus Julius Caesar, Cines, 1914), and Fabiola

(Palatino Film, 1918), or in the Middle Ages (a new version of La Gerusalemme liberata,

Guazzoni Film, 1918), or in the period of the Napoleonic Wars ( Scuola d'eroi, Cines,

1914; UK title How Heroes are Made; US title For Napoleon and France). The same

direction was followed by Luigi Maggi, Mario Caserini, Ugo Falena ( Giuliano l'apostata

('Julian the Apostate'), Bernini Film, 1919), and Nino Oxilia. Some of the most significant

expressions of Catholic orthodoxy in this context were Christus (Cines, 1916) by Giulio

Antamoro, Frate Sole ('Brother Sun', Tespi Film, 1918) by Ugo Falena, and Redenzione

('Redemption', Medusa Film, 1919) by Carmine Gallone.

Ancient Rome as grand spectacle: Enrico Guazzoni's Quo vadis? ( 1913)

REALISM: THE FIRST WAVE

Alongside the trend towards a cinema aimed at highbrow audiences, the more popular

forms, out of which cinema ramas which had begun with Tigris found its greatest

exponent in the eccentric, and, given the gossip surrounding his private life, also

somewhat romantic figure of Emilio Ghione. In Nelly la gigolette (Caesar Film, 1914)

Ghione created the character of Za la Mort -- a Frenchlooking scoundrel living among

apache gangsters -- who starred in serials such as La banda delle cifre ('The numbers

gang', Tiber-Film, 1915), Il triangolo giallo ('The yellow triangle', Tiber-Film, 1917), and

above all I topi grigi ('The grey rats', Tiber-Film, 1918), which all exploited the

restrictions imposed by a low-cost production to produce a tight, nervous narrative pace

while making full use of the visual resources provided by the landscapes of the Roman

countryside.

The stamp of realism which is clearly identifiable in I topi grigi is also evident in another

undoubtedly significant, although marginal, trend towards realism which runs through

Italian cinema of the 1910s. The most accomplished exemplar of this trend was Sperduti

nel buio ('Lost in the dark', Morgana Films, 1914), by Nino Martoglio and Roberto

Danesi, which has acquired an air of legend owing to the mysterious circumstances

surrounding its disappearance. Many other works made between 1912 and 1916 bear

witness to a marked taste for the observation of everyday life, often intertwined with

elements of melodrama -- as in L'emigrante ('The emigrant', Itala Film, 1915), by Febo

Mari, which was Ermete Zacconi's second film, or light comedies such as Addio

giovinezza! ('Farewell youth!', Itala Film, 1913), directed by Nino Oxilia and remade

twice by Augusto Genina in 1918 and 1927. Other films present examples of

straightforward naturalism: such as Assunta Spina (Caesar Film, 1915) by Gustavo Serena

and Francesca Bertini-adapted from a play by Salvatore Di Giacomoand Cenere (Ash',

Ambrosio, 1916) by Febo Mari and Arturo Ambrosio, Jr., from a book by Sardinian

novelist Grazia Deledda. The latter was the only film made by the great theatre actress

Eleonora Duse.

FROM DECADENTISM TO DECADENCE

The outbreak of the First World War and the growing power of American cinema in the

European market put an abrupt end to dreams of expansion of the Italian industry. The

heavy commitment to the war effort required of the weak national economy diverted

energies from other activities, and this draining of resources would only get worse in the

aftermath of the disastrous defeat by the Austrians at Caporetto in 1917. A substantial part

of the films which were made were dedicated to the theme of war, thus producing a brief

resurgence of the documentary genre. Propaganda efforts even extended into omedy, as

evinced in André Deed's La paura degli aeromobili nemici ('The fear of enemy flying-

machines', Itala Film, 1915) and Segundo de Chomón's children's animation La guerra e il

sogno di Momi ('The war and Momi's dream', Itala Film, 1917). Unlike in France,

however, Italian cinema was wholly unprepared for the demands thrown up by this new

situation. The geographical and financial dispersal of production centres, the lack of any

co-ordinated exhibition circuit, and the endemic disorganization of much of the

production system meant that, at the first signs of difficulty, the industry was brought to

its knees.

After the end of the war, in 1919, one late and doomed salvage attempt was made when a

group of bankers and producers, with the support of two powerful financial institutions,

set up the Unione Cinematografica Italiana (UCI), a trust under whose aegis were

gathered the eleven largest production companies in the country. But the initiative did

more harm than good. The poorly improvised attempt to create a production monopoly to

control the market destroyed all competition. The number of films made annually grew

initially from 280 in 1919 to more than 400 in 1921, but on the whole the films were

mediocre, worryingly similar to each other in their constant reprise of well-worn ideas

and, worst of all, hopelessly inadequate in the face of the American onslaught, whether at

home or abroad. Already by December 1921, the failure of one of the major backers of

the scheme -the Banca Italiana di Sconto -- had seriously wounded the consortium, and

from 1923 its constituent companies plunged one by one into a fatal crisis. From that

moment onwards, rates of output decreased rapidly, and Italian cinema sank into a mire

from which it was not to reemerge until after the end of the silent period.

A studio portrait of the Italian 'diva' Pina Minichelli

One of the genres which may be seen as partly responsible for the decline had been born

in the period before the war. Its protagonists were a set of actresses whose personalities

and acting style gave rise to the cult of the diva, which permeated all social classes and

for a certain time even spread to other European countries and to the United States (with

the short-lived meteoric career of exaggerated appropriation of symbolism and

decadentism. In the following decade, its influence was felt throughout Italian society.

Lyda Borelli, the diva par excellence, set the standard of a style based more on the

charismatic presence of the actress than on any technical or aesthetic qualities of the

production. In her films the expressivity of the body was assigned a determining role. The

characters played by Borelli-and by other divas such as Maria Carmi, Rina De Liguoro,

Maria Jacobini, Soava Gallone, Helena Makowska, Hesperia, Italia Almirante Manzini --

are sensual, tormented figures, caught between frail melancholia and anxiety, expressed

through mannered poses. They live in luxuriant and at times oppressively opulent

surroundings, where excited glances and sharp movements mirror the excess of the

costumes and scenery.

The perverse, sometimes evil nature of the divas was reinforced by the screenplays, which

were tailor-made for each actress, thereby diminishing the power and significance of the

director. Rapsodía satanica ('Satanic rhapsody') by Nino Oxilia (with an orchestral score

composed for the film by Pietro Mascagni) and Malombra by Carmine Gallone -- both

made by Cines in 1917 -- are the most striking examples of the aesthetic of 'borellismo',

the cinematic equivalent of the Italian taste for neo-classical and Pre-Raphaelite academic

imagery. Some performers, however, did manage to create distinctive styles. Francesca

Bertini, who starred in Sangue blu ('Blue blood') by Nino Oxilia (Celio Film, 1914), had a

somewhat more sober, and at times even naturalistic, acting style; and Pina Menichelli

achieved a 'D'Annunzian' morbid dramatic intensity in two Giovanni Pastrone films, Il

fuoco ('The flame', Itala Film, 1915) and Tigre reale ('Royal tiger', Itala Film, 1916, from

the story by Giovanni Verga).

The narrative world built up around the divas amounted to a compendium of love and

intrigue in upper bourgeois and aristocratic circles, a world marked by rigid social

conventions and uncontainable passions, so detached from any sense of reality as to

constitute a closed universe, dominated by sex and death. A remarkable exception to this

rule seems to have been the work of Lucio d'Ambra ( 1879-1939), whose films such as

L'illustre attrice cicala formica ('The famous actress cicada ant', 1920) and La tragedia su

tre carte ('Tragedy on three cards', 1922) were characterized by an eccentric but rich

figurative elegance. Unfortunately most of them appear to be lost.

Exceptions apart, in the 1920s melodrama of this kind became the staple fare of Italian

cinema. Both quality and quantity suffered and the industry turned in on itself, confusing

the ruins of its former glories with potential new directions. The last vestiges of the

aspiration to artistic grandeur were stamped out by a series of yet more historical genre

films: another Quo vadis?, directed by Gab riellino D'Annunzio and Georg Jacoby (UCI,

1924); another Last Days of Pompeii (Società Anonima Grandi Film, 1926), directed by

Amleto Palermi and Carmine Gallone; a suggestive, perturbing return to (Gabriele)

D'Annunzio in La nave ('The ship', Ambrosio/Zanotta, 1921) by Gabriellino D'Annunzio

and Mario Roncoroni. The avant-garde futurist movement dabbled in film, but had little

impact. The most significant evidence of their involvement to have survived is Thaïs

(Novissima Film/Enrico De Medio, 1917) by Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Riccardo

Cassano, a pale shadow of the aggressive declarations of futurist theoreticians.

TWILIGHT: STRONG MEN AND NEAPOLITANS

Of course, some of these relics were also notable commercial successes. The exceptional

demand for Cabiria had led to its being rereleased several times after 1914. Pastrone even

made a synchronized version in 1931, which was the version best known to audiences

until a restored version of the original appeared in 1995. The success of Cabiria was due

to the character of the slave Maciste (Bartolomeo Pagano), whose athletic prowess made

him a favourite with audiences and spawned a long series of films devoted to him, from

Maciste (Itala Film, 1915), by Vincenzo C. Dénizot and Romano L. Borgnetto, to the war

propaganda film Maciste alpino ('Maciste in the Alpine Regiment', Itala Film, 1916), by

Luigi Maggi and Romano L. Borgnetto, to the apotheosis of kitsch in Maciste all'inferno

(Fert-Pittaluga, 1926) by Guido Brignone. These were the first in the tradition of 'strong-

man' films, an athletic variant on the adventure film, whose protagonists are endowed

with extraordinary physical strength and untarnished simplicity of emotion. Pagano's lead

was followed in the first half of the 1920s by several other champions of the athlete-cum-

acrobat-cum-actor: Sansone (Luciano Albertini), Saetta (Domenico Gambino), Galaor

(Domenico Boccolini) and the Graeco-Roman wrestling champion Giovanni Raicevich.

Elsewhere, the fading fortunes of cinema on a national scale contributed to a spontaneous

renaissance in a formerly minor area of film-making, the Neapolitan dialect melodrama.

The companies behind this strange phenomenon were in some cases organized on a

family basis. The films were distributed mainly in southern Italy and in the larger

northern cities, although on occasion they were exported to wherever emigrant

communities had settled. The Dora Film Company, owned by Elvira and Nicola Notari,

which had been founded shortly after 1910, succeeded in infusing its films with a

simplicity and authenticity which was far removed from the anodyne 'modernity' of the

commercial films being made for nation-wide audiences. 'A santanotte ('Holy Night') and

E'piccerella ('The little girl', Film Dora, 1922), both directed by Elvira Notari, are two of

the most important films in a genre which has its roots in the Neapolitan popular theatre

form, the sceneggiata (a simple, powerful drama interspersed with popular songs), which

was directed and acted by non-professionals, with no artistic or technical training, and yet

which managed to strike a chord with the audiences' feelings.

Still in Naples, Gustavo Lombardo had set up his own production company in 1918 which

emerged unscathed from the collapse of UCI. Hence, in the second half of the 1920s,

when directors, actors, and technicians were leaving in droves for France and Germany,

Lombardo Film continued to produce a steady stream of relatively goodquality films,

including a number starring the talented actress Leda Gys. Gys had performed with

outstanding results alongside Francesca Bertini in the pantomime Histoire d'un pierrot ('A

pierrot's story', Italica Ars/Celio Film, 1914) by Baldassarre Negroni. For Lombardo, she

made a trilogy entitled Ifigli di nessuno ('Children of nobody', 1921), directed by Ubaldo

Maria Del Colle, which combined populist drama with a significant degree of polemical

social critique. Lombardo Film changed its name to Titanus, and some years later moved

to Rome to join forces with a new organization founded by the Genoese producer Stefano

Pittaluga in a move which radically transformed the distribution system throughout Italy.

In the desolate panorama of the national film industry at the end of the 1920s, there are

some signs of renewal. The influence of the Fascist regime was still only marginal: it had

set up the Istituto Nazionale LUCE (acronym of L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa --

the Union of Cinema and Education) in 1924 with the aim of exploiting cinema for

propagandist and didactic ends, but it generally refrained from direct intervention in the

affairs of the industry. Aldo De Benedetti demonstrated in La grazia ('Grace', Attori e

Direttori Italiani Associati, 1929) how even a traditional story-line could give rise to a

style of filming of extraordinary purity.

The first Italian sound film to be released was a sentimental comedy by Gennaro Righelli,

La canzone dell'amore ('The love song', Cines, 1930), which came out also in French and

German versions. It was shortly followed by Sole ('Sun', Società Anonima Augustus,

1929) by Alessandro Blasetti, a film about the draining of the Pontine marshes which

showed the influence of German and Soviet cinema. Another young director, Mario

Camerini, who had already shown himself capable of injecting new energy into the worn

formulas of adventure films and bourgeois comedies through a more smooth and

technically sophisticated style -- as in Voglio tradire mio marito! ('I want to betray my

husband!', Fert Film, 1925) and Kif tebby (Attori e Direttori Italiani Associati, 1928) --

now took a further step forwards with Rotaie ('Rails', SACIA, 1929), which was shot as a

silent film, but came out two years later in a sound version. The Sole and Rotaie are

marked by clearly differing intentions, but both are inclined towards experimentation with

new forms which refashion with vision and authority the Italian vocation for realism.

Bibliography

Bernardini, Aldo ( 1980-82), Cinema muto italiano, 1896-1914.

--- (ed.) ( 1991), Archivo del cinema italiano, Vol. i: Il cinema muto, 19051931.

--- and Gili, Jean A. (eds.) ( 1986), Le Cinéma italien.

--- and Martinelli, Vittorio ( 1979), Il cinema italiano degli anni Venti.

Brunetta, Gian Piero ( 1980), Stotia del cinema italiano, Vol. i: 19051945.

Dall'Asta, Monica ( 1992), Un Cinéma musclé: le surhomme dans le cinéma muet italien

(1913-1926).

Leprohon, Pierre ( 1972), The Italian Cinema.

Martinelli, Vittorio ( 1980-91), "Il cinema muto italiano, 19151931".

Masi, Stefano, and Franco, Mario ( 1988), Il mare, la luna, i coltelli: per una storia del

cinema muto napoletano.

Redi, Riccardo ( 1986), Ti parlerb . . . d'amor: cinema italiano fra muto e sonoro.

British Cinema from Hepworth to Hitchcock

JOHN HAWKRIDGE

The tendency among film historians has always been to represent the British cinema as

having had influential and innovative beginnings-the so-called British pioneers-but then

to have fallen into decline and stagnation. From this perspective, as expressed for

example by Georges Sadoul ( 1951), Rescued by Rover (Cecil Hepworth, 1905) is the

high point. Films produced after that date, particularly in the period ( 1908-13) when one-

reel dramatic narrative was dominant, have been neglected. Even writers like Barry Salt

( 1992), who has done a careful formal analysis of films from the early years, have

focused perhaps unduly on fictional dramatic narrative, at the expense of the comic film

and -- even more important -- the various forms of actuality film.

As a result of these historiographical biases, a certain injustice has been done to British

films of the immediately post-'pioneer' period. Where there was innovation, it has been

overlooked, or interpreted in the light of later developments, notably those that came to be

part of the dominant Hollywood mode from 1913 onwards. In fact British films of the

period were often quite sophisticated, particularly in the comic and actuality fields.

Narrative editing, too, was often innovative -- but, unfortunately, the innovations tended

to be in directions which went against the grain of what was to prove the dominant

approach.

EARLY FORMAL DEVELOPMENTS

Before 1907-8, it was the actuality (in its broadest generic sense) and the comic film that

dominated British production output. Producers were geographically widespread,

although in the period after 1906 most of the production companies were located in or

around London. Thousands of titles were produced; before 1902 most consisted of only

one shot, but by 1905 lengthier films had led to the development of some reasonably

complex editing strategies. For example, the point-of-view shot pair came into relatively

early usage in British film. A particularly early example of this narrational strategy can be

found in the Gaumont (British) film The Blacksmith's Daughter ( 1904). Here the second

shot of the point-of-view shot pair is cued by having an old man lift a child up to look

over a fence, into a garden which a couple (the daughter of the title and her lover) have

just entered. The second shot shows the field of vision; it lacks the presence in shot of the

looker(s), but is taken from the space occupied by the man and the child in the previous

shot. That this is intended as a point-of-view perspective is shown by the fact that the

camera has been placed so as to shoot the scene through the fence, with the railings

clearly visible in the second shot.

The Blacksmith's Daughter is not the only early British film that displays innovative

shooting and editing strategies. The 1906 actuality A Visit to Peek Frean and Co.'s Biscuit

Works (Cricks and Sharp, 1906) is remarkable not only for its relative length -- in excess

of 2,000 feet when most fictional subjects were less than 500 feet -- but also because of

its use of high-angle camera shots, panning, and tilt movement, and its use of scene

dissection to give a more complete view of specific factory processes.

Despite the attention that has been paid by film historians to the development of early

editing practices, one particular technique, which has relevance to comic, actuality, and

fictional film narratives, has been largely overlooked; the jump cut in the context of shots

which maintain a continuity of framing. For example, in The Missing Legacy; or, The

Story of a Brown Hat (Gaumont Film Company, 1906), when a fight develops between

the protagonist and three men, there is a cut at the point where the protagonist is wrestled

to the ground. This is not 'lost footage' but a jump cut which allows the man's clothing to

be reduced to tatters during the 'absent time' of the cut. The film-maker disguised this lack

of clothing continuity by having the action staged largely out of frame, and by having the

protagonist partially obscured by his attackers. Similarly, the jump cut is important in the

narrative construction of some of the actuality films of the period. Thus in Building a

British Railway -- Constructing the Locomotive (Urban, 1905) the jump cut (keeping

continuity of framing) is used to create the temporal ellipsis that allows various stages in

the process to be shown, including both initial and final stages of construction.

Film-makers of this period in fact showed considerable ingenuity in developing editing

and shooting practices which ensured the effect they desired, whether in comic and

actuality films or dramatic narrative films. For example, the device of the 'ingenious

cheat' (Salt, 1992), whereby actor movement is used to simulate camera movement, has

been noted in the case of Ladies Skirts Nailed to a Fence (Bamforth, 1900). However, this

practice was not restricted to such comic sketches, but clearly also had a function in

fictional dramatic narratives.

Cecil Hepworth's Rescued by Rover ( 1905) was a major commercial success, and in

order to produce enough prints to meet demand, Hepworth's company remade the film

twice. From a narrative perspective all three films are the same, but at the level of film

form there are some small yet significant differences. In the first version of the film the

scene in which the remorse-stricken nurse bursts into the room and confesses to the loss

of the child is handled differently from the two later versions. The first version breaks this

scene down into two shots, the second being filmed from a closer camera position and at a

slightly different angle to the action. The other two versions, however, simply use one

shot -- the second camera set-up. Thus, on the face of it, the earliest version makes use of

scene dissection, whilst the later versions do not. If we view scene dissection as a

development in film form, then here we have a seeming regression. What has happened,

however, is rather that the film-maker has learnt from the 'mistake' in the staging of the

scene in the first version, in which the two shots of this scene register perceptually as a

change of camera position when it is actually the actors who have moved. Thus by 1905

Hepworth had a clear idea of how close the camera should be to the staged action, and

was prepared to move the actors forward to accommodate. When confronted by a similar

problem in a scene in Falsely Accused, produced the same year, Hepworth moved the

camera forward, since the staging of the action (with an attempted exit through a window

being dramatically important) precluded the possibility of moving the actors.

THE MAIN FILM GENRES

The fact that British films in the period up to 1906-7 were successful and influential,

nationally and internationally, has been well documented. Even contemporary critical

writing confirms the view of the superiority of British films vis-à-vis their American

counterparts. An editorial in the Projection Lantern and Cinematograph of July 1906

states, 'The cinematograph trade seems to be booming in the States. The demand for films

is exceptionally heavy, with the result that very inferior subjects are being produced,

many of which would not be tolerated at British halls'. The British success was derived

from both innovative filmmaking ( Fire!, Daring Daylight Burglary, Desperate Poaching

Affray) and the fact that international markets were open. However, by 1912 the situation

had reversed. The Moving Picture World of 20 January 1912 commented, 'English films

in this country are a hopeless drug on the market and cannot even please the Canadians.'

So why the fall? Hepworth himself, in his autobiography, refers to being 'not sufficiently

alive to the many changes which were occurring in the industry', and such Hepworth films

as Dumb Sagacity ( 1907) and The Dog Outwits the Kidnappers ( 1908) do show a

remarkable similarity (in story and film form) to the earlier Rescued by Rover. Added to

the perceived lack of quality of British films, and not unrelated, was the effective closure

of the American market to British producers with the formation of the Motion Picture

Patents Company in 1908.

It was around this time that the series film first appeared on British screens. The British

and Colonial Kinematograph Company (hereafter B. & C.) moved into the production of

series films at an early date. The Exploits of Three-Fingered Kate (First Series) was

reviewed in the Bioscope in October 1909, and a number of series were to follow in the

years leading up to the First World War. In terms of popular success none was more

important than the Lieutenant Daring series, which first appeared in 1911; the Bioscope of

28 March 1912 published an interview (and photograph) of Lieutenant Daring, 'the

famous English film actor'. However, since the interview was conducted with references

solely to Daring the fictional character, and not to Percy Moran, the actor who played the

role, then it would be more correct to refer to the notion of a picture personality rather

than a star. From the perspective of film form these B. & C. series films are also

interesting because of their use of emblematic shots (of the eponymous hero/heroine) at

the end (or, less often, at the beginning) of the films. Their inclusion might be seen in

terms of a generic code, since shots of this type are relatively rare in other film genres,

with the exception of the comic film, where again emblematic shots can be found at the

beginning or end of the film in productions from various British companies.

The importance of the Daring series can also be gauged by the fact that, when B. & C.

undertook a production trip to the West Indies in 1913 (something of a first for a British

company to take its artists such a distance), Percy Moran was in the party, and at least one

series entry was shot in Jamaica; Lt. Daring and the Dancing Girl. Although the West

Indies was its most far flung and exotic shooting location, this company often made use

of scenic location shooting, a fact that its publicity emphasized. For example, the first in

the Don Qseries of films ( 1912) was advertised as having been filmed 'amidst

Derbyshire's rugged and picturesque' hills, and this strategy of foregrounding scenic

pleasure is structured into the film itself in The Mountaineer's Romance ( 1912), when an

introductory title card announces, 'This Photo-Play Was Enacted Around The Beautiful

Peak District, Derbyshire'.

The parodic film appeared relatively early in British film production. In the same year as

Charles Urban first produced his Unseen World series of films, the Hepworth Company

made a parody of it. The format of the Urban series was based on combining the

technologies of the microscope and the movie camera, to produce magnified views of the

'natural world'. Hepworth's The Unclean World ( 1903) has a man place a piece of the

food he has been eating under a microscope. A circular mask shot then reveals two

beetles, but the joke is realized when two hands enter the frame and turn the beetles over,

revealing their clockwork mechanisms.

It was with the series film, however, that the parody almost developed into a genre in its

own right. B. & C.'s 'Three-Fingered Kate', who is continually eluding the hapless

Detective Sheerluck, may well be a direct parody of Éclair's 'Nick Carter -- le roi des

détectives'. The sending up of current events, and particularly current film releases, was

the stock-in-trade of Fred Evans, the most successful screen comic in Britain around

1913-14, who in the latter year produced a number of spoof 'Lieutenant Pimple' films,

including Lieutenant Pimple and the Stolen Invention. The Hepworth Company was also

producing spoofs of B. & C.'s and Clarendon's naval heroes. The prevalence of these

cheap-to-produce parodies is an indicator both of the lack of any comic star in the British

cinema in the pre-war period and of the still largely artisanal nature of British film

production, with the concomitant lack of finance, since much of the comic pleasure of

these film parodies resides in cheapness of production. The only requirement was that the

audience could make the necessary link back to the parodied film(s), and most often this

was clearly signalled in the titles themselves.

Although good at producing popular and cheap series and parodies for the home market,

British companies were slow at exploiting their own cultural heritage, unlike the

American competitors such as Vitagraph, who produced A Tale of Two Cities ( 1911) to

celebrate the centenary of Dickens. British producers concentrated heavily on comedy

production in this period, when the dramatic narrative had become the staple of the

industry. For example, of the films released in Britain in January 1910, the only British

company with a significant number of fictional drama releases is Hepworth, and these

were considerably shorter than comparable films from European and American producers

(three of the four dramas released by Hepworth in that month were less than 500 feet,

whereas European and American dramas were closer to 1,000).

None the less by 1912 there was a degree of optimism in the British trade press, and the

view expressed by both Cecil Hepworth ( 1931) and George Pearson ( 1957) was that by

1911-12 British companies had largely caught up lost ground. This was particularly true

for companies like Hepworth and B. & C., who began to produce a more attractive

product through, for example, the good dramatic use of scenic locations and a more

restrained and naturalistic acting style, notably in films like A Fisherman's Love Story

(Hepworth, 1912) and The Mountaineer's Romance (B. & C., 1912). Some of these films

also display a remarkable degree of filmic sophistication. For example, in Lt. Daring and

the Plans for the Minefields (B. & C., 1912), a scene in which Daring prepares to pilot a

plane is broken down into a series of four shots, involving axial cut-ins and a reverseangle

shot.

Clive Brook and Betty Compson in the successful British melodrama Woman to Woman (

1923), directed by Graham Cutts from a script by Alfred Hitchcock

COMPETITION FROM AMERICA

However, if British film-makers had 'caught up' in 191112, the rise to dominance of the

multi-reel film shortly afterwards, and the distribution practices of American film

companies, would again leave the British trailing behind. The home industry suffered

from the way a number of American companies 'tied in' British exhibitors. For example,

the Gaumont Weekly of 28 August 1913 complained, 'Many theatres have exclusive

contracts with the American manufacturers -- a cheap way of supplying the theatre'.

Almost coincident with the shift to multireel films as the industrial norm was the

emergence of a star system in America. This was not the case in Britain, where even in the

1920s the only actresses who could be called British film stars were Chrissie White and

Alma Taylor (particularly through their work with Hepworth) and Betty Balfour. Stars in

general and male film stars in particular were significantly lacking, in a period when they

were so central to the rise to dominance of the American film. Indeed, writing as late as

1925, Joseph Schenck commented brutally on British film productions: 'You have no

personalities to put on the screen. The stage actors and actresses are no good on the

screen. Your effects are no good, and you do not spend nearly so much money'

( Bioscope, 8 January 1925). Related to the lack of male stars in the British film industry

was an accompanying lack of any action genre equivalent to the Western, and the lack of

light comedy, genres which established so many American male stars in the 1910s and

1920s.

Despite the low esteem in which most British film productions were held, particularly in

the international market-place, optimism remained high in the immediate post-war years

in the British trade press, though the idea of a protection system, for example by the

imposition of import quotas, was beginning to gain ground. The London Film Company

had made use of American personnel (producers and actors) as a means of differentiating

its products from other British producers as early as 1913, and continued with this

strategy through the war years. A similar strategy was adopted by B. & C. after the war,

although with the quite specific aim of breaking into international markets, particularly

the American. Despite some initial success, the American market remained as elusive for

this company as it proved for other British producers, and by the mid-1920s the company

went out of business. In terms of production and exhibition, 1926 can be seen as the nadir

of the British film industry; according to the Moyne Report not more than 5 per cent of

films exhibited that year in Britain originated from British studios.

But it was not only American distribution practices and lack of capitalization or a star

system which hampered the potential success of the British film. At a time when

American films were clearly beginning to exhibit the dynamic traits associated with

continuity editing, British films were often marked by narrational uncertainty and the

inability to construct a unified spatio-temporal narrative logic (the hallmarks of what we

now call the classical Hollywood style). For example, the distinction between fade and

cut shot transitions, which had become clearly established in the American cinema in the

1910s, was often lacking in British films. Thus in The Passions of Men ( Clarendon,

1914) the temporal logic of the narrative is at times disrupted when shot transitions are

made by fades rather than cuts, and vice versa. Hepworth, idiosyncratic even in the

context of British film-making, used the fade as the general mode of shot transition, even

into the 1920s. The fact that Hepworth used the fade transition not for temporal ellipsis,

but simply to link shots together, posed a number of narrational problems. Most

obviously, compared to Hollywood films, with their slick continuity editing, the films

appeared slow and ponderous. More specifically, the constant use of the fade transition

tended to emphasize the discontinuous nature of narrative space, and the films, albeit

often of beautiful pictorial quality, become a series of 'views'. Regarded by Hepworth as

his best and most important film, Comin' thro' the Rye ( 1916) did not find a distributor in

America. As Hepworth somewhat poignantly states in his autobiography, regarding his

attempts to find an American distributor, 'I was told that it might not be so bad if it was

jazzed up a bit, and I came home.'

Although Hepworth's films of the 1910s and 1920s were admittedly idiosyncratic, other

British films from this period exhibited varying degrees of narrational uncertainty. A

lengthy part of the narrative in Barker's melodrama The Road to Ruin ( 1913) is devoted

to a dream sequence. However, clearly uncertain as to the audience's ability to follow the

narrative logic of the story, the filmmakers twice remind the spectator of the dream status

of the events unfolding; once through a return to a shot of the protagonist dreaming, and

once through the interpolation of an intertitle, which simply states, '-- and dreaming still .

. .' . Similarly, the use of the point-of-view shot pair, although increasingly common in

films of the 1910s, was sometimes used with a degree of equivocation. Many of the films

of the early 1910s did not use a true optical point of view, but moved the camera 180

degrees in relation to the character looking off screen, so that the second shot reveals not

only the object of the look, but also the 'looker' as well. At a key point in The Ring and

the Rajah ( Londan Films Co., 1914), the film makes use of pointof-view shots. One of

these has the rajah looking intently off screen, through some open French windows. This

is followed by a shot of the rajah's rival in love, from a camera placement that

approximates to the rajah's optical viewpoint. The relationship between these shots was

clearly not regarded as self-explanatory, and an intertitle is introduced, with the words

'What the Rajah saw'. The next shot, which has both the looker (the rajah's servant) and

the object of the look in shot is then in turn preceded by an intertitle which states, 'What

the servant saw', suggesting a distinct lack of confidence in the audience's ability to read

point-of-view articulations, in spite of the act that they had been in use in both the

American and British cinema for nearly a decade.

Thus it was not only under-capitalization, or the lack of a star system, but also aspects of

film form that made British films so uncompetitive with those of the United States.

Reference to British films in the American trade press as 'soporific' can in large part be

linked to issues of film form -- lack of scene dissection and degrees of narrational

uncertainty. Indeed, a film such as Nelson ( 1918), produced by Maurice Elvey for

International Exclusives, can fairly be described as primitive -- whether in terms of its

cheap and poorly designed backdrops, its wooden acting, or a mode of narrative

construction that makes minimal use of continuity editing. It is mainly the film's length

(seven reels), that distinguishes it from films produced a decade before.

Ivor Novello and Mae Marsh in The Rat ( 1925), the story of a Parisian jewel thief,

directed by Graham Cutts and produced by Michael Balcon

THE 1920S: A NEW GENERATION

By the mid- 1920s most of the pre-war production companies had gone out of business,

and with them such 'pioneers' as Cecil Hepworth. A new generation of pro ducers or

producer-directors entered the industry during this period. Both Michael Balcon

(producer) and Herbert Wilcox (producer-director) adopted similar strategies to develop

the indigenous industry. One such strategy was the importation of Hollywood stars. This

was not a total novelty, but in the past it had met with only limited success. However,

Wilcox successfully utilized the talents of Dorothy Gish, and in doing so also established

a deal with Paramount. More important was the development of co-production

agreements by both Balcon and Wilcox, and other British producers. Co-productions,

particularly with Germany but also with other countries such as Holland, would become a

significant factor in the development of the British film industry in the mid- and late

1920s. It was as a result of this practice that the young Alfred Hitchcock acquired

experience of German production methods when he was sent to work at the Ufa studios in

Neubabelsberg early on in his career with Gainsborough.

For Herbert Wilcox, the agreements he signed with Ufa were important not only as a way

of opening up the market but also because the contracts gave him access to the tates.

However, this success was in large part attributable to spectacle (adequately financed) and

the sexual dynamic of the narrative; but Wilcox, unlike Hitchcock and some other young

directors, seems to have learnt little from the encounter with German cinema, and, from

the perspective of film form, Decameron Nights is a film still marked by the relatively

long scale of most of its shots and a general lack of scene dissection.

Michael Balcon was an important figure in the British film industry for a number of

reasons. Although he produced only a relatively small number of films in the 1920s, most

of them, including The Rat ( Gainsborough, 1925), were big commercial successes.

Further, Balcon's career was a clear signpost to that division of labour that came rather

late in the British film industry: that is, between producing and directing. Balcon was a

producer, rather than a producer-director, and it was only the separation of these roles that

allowed the development of skills specifically associated with each function.

Although in the context of British culture film-making was generally. held in low esteem,

a number of university graduates were to enter the film industry towards the end of this

period, including Anthony Asquith, the son of the Liberal Prime Minister. Asquith had not

only developed a considerable knowledge of European cinema during his university days,

but his privileged background enabled him to meet many Hollywood stars and directors

during his visits to the United States. The importance of these factors became evident

when he began his film career. On Shooting Stars (British Instructional Films, 1928)

Asquith was assistant director, but he had also written the screenplay, and was involved

with the editing of the film. Shooting Stars was self-reflexive, in so far as it was a film

about the film industry, film-making, and stars, although the reference was more to

Hollywood than England, with Brian Aherne featuring as a Western genre hero. The

lighting (by Karl Fischer), the use of a variety of camera angles, and the rapid editing of

some sequences linked the film more to a German mode of expression. These elements,

combined with the fact that the screenplay was not developed from a West End theatre

production, unlike so many British productions in the 1920s, produced a film that was

pure cinema.

By the end of the 1920s the British film industry was transformed. The shift to vertical

integration established a stronger industrial base, and, despite its negative aspects, the

protective legislation introduced in 1927 did also lead to an expansion of the industry. The

new generation who entered the industry in the mid-1920s had a greater knowledge and

understanding of developments taking place in both European cinema and Hollywood,

and this was also to play its part in the transformation of the British cinema, making it

better prepared to face the introduction of sound at the end of the decade.

Bibliography

Hepworth, Cecil ( 1951), Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer.

Low, Rachael ( 1949), The History of the British Film, ii: 1906-1914.

--- ( 1950), The History of the British Film, iii: 1914-18.

--- ( 1971), The History of the British Film, iv: 1918-29.

--- and Manvell, Roger ( 1948), The History of the British Film, i: 18961906.

Pearson, George ( 1957), Flashback: The Autobiography of a British Filmmaker.

Sadoul, Georges ( 1951), Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. iii.

Salt, Barry ( 1992), Film Style and Technology.

Conrad Veidt (1893-1943)

Conrad Veidt as the German Lieutenant Hart in Michael Powell 's The Spy in Black

( 1939)

Conrad Veidt started his career in 1913, at Max Reinhardt's acting school. After a short

period of employment in the First World War as a member of different front theatre

ensembles, he returned to the Deutsches Theater Berlin, and then, in 1916, began working

in the movies. In 1919, in the first homosexual role on screen in Anders als die Andern,

and above all as the somnambulist Cesare in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, he created an

expressionist acting style that made him an international star. In the early 1920s he starred

in several of Richard Os wald 's Sittenfilme dealing with sexual enlightenment, and went

on to work with many of the best-known directors of the time. Veidt moved to the USA in

the second half of the decade, but returned to Germany on the introduction of sound,

starring in some of the early Ufa sound successes and their English versions. In 1932

Veidt started work in Britain, shooting a pro-Semitic version of Jew Suss ( 1934) and the

more equivocal Wandering Jew ( 1933), after which he became persona non grata in Nazi

Germany. With his Jewish wife Lily Preger he remained in London, gaining British

citizenship in 1939. He continued to work, incarnating Prussian officers for Victor Saville

and Michael Powell. In 1940 he moved to Hollywood, where he was cast mainly as a

Nazi - most famously, Major Strasser in Casablanca ( 1942).From figures reach beyond

the scope of the familiar scoundrel cliché. His characters are burdened with the

knowledge that they are doomed, and so have an introverted and stoic edge, accepting

their fate and never compromising in order to save their own lives. They always remain

true to their mission and often border on the fanatical in their sense of duty and singleness

of vision. However, Veidt's characters are also enveloped in an aura of melancholy which

is made distinguished by their good manners and cosmopolitan elegance. Veidt's face

reveals much of the inner life of his characters. The play of muscles beneath the taut skin,

the lips pressed together, a vein on his temple visibly protruding, nostrils flaring in

concentration and self-discipline. These physical aspects characterize the artists,

sovereigns, and strangers of the German silent films, as well as the Prussian officers of

the British and Hollywood periods.The intensity of Veidt's facial expressions is supported

by the modulation of his voice and his clear articulation. His tongue and his slightly

irregular teeth become visible when he speaks, details which allow his words to flow

carefully seasoned from his wide mouth - in contrast to the slang-like mutterings of

Humphrey Bogart who played opposite him in two US productions of the 1940s. Veidt's

German accent is a failing which he turns into a strength; it becomes the means of

structuring the flow of speech. The voice, which can take on every nuance from an

ingratiating whisper to a barking command, is surprising in its abrupt changes in tone.

Once heard, it is easy to imagine the voices of his silent film characters. Veidt's late film

roles reflect back on the early silent ones, enriching them retrospectively with a sound-

track.DANIELA SANNWALDSELECT FILMOGRAPHY (with directors) Der Weg des

Todes ( Robert Reinert, 1916-17); Anders als die Andern ( Richard Oswald, 1918-19);

Das Cabinet des Dr Cattgari ( 1919-20); Das indische Grabmal ( Joe May, 1921); Die

Brûder Schellenberg ( Karl Grune, 1925); Der Student von Prag ( Henrik Galeen , 1926);

The Man who Laughs (USA, Paul Leni, 1927); Die letzte Kompagnie ( Kurt Bernhardt,

1929); Der Kongress tanzt ( Erik Charell, 1931); Jew Süss ( Lothar Mendes, 1934); The

Spy in Black ( Michael Powell, 1939); Casablanca ( Michael Curtiz, 1942); Above

Suspicion ( Richard Thorpe, 1943)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Jerry C. ( 1987), From Caligari to Casablanca.

Jacobsen, Wolfgang (ed.) ( 1993), Conrad Veidt: Lebensbilder.

Sannwald, Daniela ( 1993), "Continental Stranger: Conrad Veidt und seine britischen

Filme".

Germany: The Weimar Years

THOMAS ELSAESSER

'German Cinema' recalls the 1920s, Expressionism, Weimar culture, and a time when

Berlin was the cultural centre of Europe. For film historians, this period is sandwiched

between the pioneering work of American directors like D. W. Griffith, Ralph Ince, Cecil

B. DeMille, and Maurice Tourneur in the 1910s, and the Soviet montage cinema of Sergei

Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin in the late 1920s. The names of Ernst

Lubitsch, Robert Wiene, Paul Leni, Fritz Lang, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, and Georg

Wilhelm Pabst stand, in this view, for one of the 'golden ages' of world cinema, helping-

between 1918 and 1928-to make motion pictures an artistic and avantgarde medium.

Arguably, such a view of film history is no longer unchallenged, yet surprisingly many of

the German films from this period are part of the canon: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Das

Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1919), The Golem (Der Golem, wie er in die Welt

karo, Paul Wegener, 1920), Destiny (Der müde Tod, Fritz Lang, 1921), Nosferatu ( F. W.

Murnau , 1921), Dr Mabuse ( Lang, 1922), Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, 1924),

The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, Murnau, 1924), Metropolis ( Lang, 1925), Pandora's

Box (Die Biichse der Pandora, G. W. Pabst, 1928). Even more surprisingly, they have also

entered popular movie mythology and now live on, parodied, pastiched, and recycled, in

very different guises, from pulp movies to post-modern videoclips. In their time, the films

were associated with German Expressionism, mainly because of their self-conscious

stylization of décor, gesture, and lighting. Others regarded the same pre-eminence of

stylization, fantasy, and nightmare visions as evidence of the inner torment and moral

dilemmas in those for whom the films were made. Equivocation was not confined to the

films: did the films reflect the political chaos of the Weimar Republic, or did the parade of

tyrants, madmen, somnambulists, crazed scientists, and homunculi anticipate the horrors

that were to follow between 1933 and 1945? But why not assume that the films, even in

their own time, look back, cocking a snook at Romanticism and neo-Gothic? The standard

works on the subject, Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen ( 1969) and Siegfried Kracauer's

From Caligari to Hitler ( 1947), resolutely do not consider this last possibility, but opt, as

their somewhat lurid titles indicate, for seeing the films as symptoms of troubled souls.

Eisner's and Kracauer's powerful portraits left much else about the early German cinema

in the shadows. In some respects, the spotlight they cast on the early and mid-1920s only

deepened the darkness into which prejudice and physical destruction had already plunged

the first two decades of German film history. One point to make when reassessing the

earliest period is that Germany could boast, in the field of film technology, optics, and

photographic instruments, of a fair share of inventors and 'pioneers': Simon Stampfer,

Ottomar Anschütz, the Skladanowsky brothers, Oskar Messter, Guido Seeber, the

Stollwerck and Agfa works connote innovators of international stature, but also a solid

manufacturing and engineering basis. Yet Wilhelmine Germany was not a major film-

producing nation. Cultural resistance as much as economic conservatism caused film

production up to about 1912/13 to stagnate at a pre-industry stage. While the

Skladanowsky brothers' first public presentation of their Bioskop projector in November

1895 at the Berlin Wintergarten narrowly precedes the Lumière brothers' first public

demonstration of the Cinématographe, the lead in exhibition did not translate into

production.

THE WILHELMINE YEARS

Of the companies that established themselves mainly in Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich,

the firms of Messter, Greenbaum, Duskes, Continental-Kunstfilm, and Deutsche

Mutoskop und Biograph stand out. They were often family businesses, manufacturing

optical and photographic equipment, which entered into film production mainly as a way

of selling cameras and projectors. Oskar Messter appears to have been interested in the

scientific and military uses of the cinema as much as he was in its entertainment potential.

By contrast, the strategy of Paul Davidson, the other important German producer of the

1910s, was entirely entertainment-oriented. Originally successful in the Frankfurt fashion

business, Davidson built his Allgemeine Kinematographen Gesellschaft Union Theater

(later: PAGU) bottom-up, from the films to the sites and the hardware. In 1909 he opened

a 1,200seater cinema at the Berlin Alexanderplatz, and took up production, to

complement his supply of films from foreign companies, notably Pathé in Paris and the

Nordisk Film Kompagni in Copenhagen. While Messter was still experimenting with his

'Tonbilder' (arias from Salome, Siegfried, Tannhäuser filmed in the studio and

synchronized with sound cylinders for projection), Davidson, in 1911, took under contract

one of the Nordisk's major assets, Asta Nielsen and her husband-director Urban Gad.

By the outbreak of the war, no more than 14 per cent of the total films shown in German

cinemas were Germanproduced. The films that have survived from before 1913 reflect

this haphazard growth quite accurately. For the first decade, actuality films ( Berlin street

scenes, military parades, naval launches, the Kaiser reviewing troops), vaudeville and

trapeze acts (a boxing kangaroo, tumbling acrobats, cycle tricks), fashion shows, and

erotic bathing scenes make up the bulk of the films, along with comic sketches in the

Pathé manner, magic lantern or zoetrope slides transferred to film, trick films, and

mother-in-law jokes.

From 1907 onwards, one begins to recognize a certain generic profile: dramas featuring

children and domestic animals ( Detected by her Dog, 1910; Carlchen und Carlo, 1912),

social dramas centred on maid-servants, governesses, and shopgirls ( Heimgefunden,

1912; Madeleine, 1912), mountain films ( Wildschiitzenrache (A poacher's revenge'),

1909; Der Alpenjäger ('Alpine hunter'), 1910), love triangles at sea ( Der Schatten des

Meeres ('The shadow of the sea'), 1912), and marital dramas in time of war and peace

( The Two Suitors, 1910, Zweimal gelebt ('Two lives'), 1911). On the whole, the titles are

indicative of an ideologically conservative society, conventional in its morality, philistine

in its tastes, but, above all, family-oriented. Yet the films themselves, while often

ponderous and predictable, show that much care was taken over the visual mise-en-scène.

A number of films have the cinema itself as subject: Der stellungslose Photograph ('The

unemployed photographer', 1912), Die Filmprimadonna ('The film star'), and Zapata's

Bande ('Zapata's gang') (both with Asta Nielsen, 1913). They are almost the only

suggestion that German pre-war films, too, could communicate some of the modernity,

the zany energy, and raffish bohemianism to which the cinema owed its mass appeal and

which was so typical of French, American, and especially Danish films of the period.

As to German film stars, there is no doubt that the first one was Kaiser Wilhelm II

himself, always shown strutting with his generals and admirals. Asta Nielsen was soon

rivalled by Henny Porten (a discovery of Messter) as Germany's major female star of the

pre-war period, though she remained much less well known internationally. Messter, who

had begun to make longer films by 1909, proved adept at taking actors from stage and

vaudeville under contract, giving many later stars their début, among them Emil Jannings,

Lil Dagover, and Conrad Veidt.

The year 1913 was a turning-point for the German cinema, as it was in other film-making

countries. By then, the exhibition situation had stabilized around the threeto five-reel

feature film, premièred in luxury cinemas. German film production increased, developing

a number of genres that were to become typical. Outstanding among them were suspense

dramas and detective films, some of them ( Die Landstrasse ('The highway'), Hands of

Justice, Der Mann im Keller ('The man in the cellar')), showing a quantum increase in

cinematic sophistication, with remarkable use of outdoor locations and period interiors.

Lighting, camera movement, and editing began to be deployed as part of a recognizable

stylistic system, which compares interestingly with the handling of space and narration in

American or French films of the time.

A scene from Leni's "Expressionist" Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, 1924)

Adapted from Danish and French serials, the crime films often featured a star detective

with an Anglicized name, such as Stuart Webbs, Joe Deebs, or Harry Higgs. As private

detective and master criminal try to outwit each other, their cars and taxi-rides, railway

pursuits and telephone calls convey the drive and energy of the new medium. The films

cast a fascinated eye on modern technology and urban locations, on the mechanics of

crime and detection, while the protagonists revel in disguise and transformation,

motivating spectacular stunts, especially in the frequent chase scenes.

A distinct vitality and wit exudes from the cinema of Franz Hofer ( Die schwarze Kugel

('The black ball')) and Joseph Delmont, whose feeling for the excitement of the

metropolitan scene makes him depict Berlin, in Das Recht auf Dasein ('The right to live'),

gripped by a construction and housing boom. Henny Porten and Asta. Nielsen were no

match in popularity for the first matinee idol superstar, Harry Piel, specializing in daring

adventure and chase films. An exception to the rule that Germans have no film humour is

the comedies of Franz Hofer ( Hurrah! Einquartierung and Das rosa Pantöffelchen),

which prove worthy antecedents of Ernst Lubitsch's farces from the mid-1910s, with their

tomboyish, headstrong heroines.

These popular genres and stars have often been neglected in accounts of the period,

because of the more commented-on aspect of 1913, namely, the emergence of the so-

called Autorenfilm ('author's film'). Initiated under the impact of the French film d'art, the

aim was to profit from the established reputation of published or performed authors, and

to persuade the leading names of Berlin's theatres to lend cultural prestige to the screen.

Not only were popular but now forgotten writers such as Paul Lindau and Heinrich

Lautensack signed on, but also Gerhard Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Arthur

Schnitzler. Because of an acrimonious union dispute in 1911, actors had been

contractually forbidden to appear in films, but when in 1913 Albert Bassermann agreed to

star in Max Mack's adaptation of the Lindau play Der Andere ('The other one', 1913),

others followed suit. Davidson took under contract the star-maker par excellence, Max

Reinhardt, who directed two films, Eine venezianische Nacht (A Venetian night', 1913)

and Insel der Seligen ('The island of the blessed', 1913), full of mythological and fairy-

tale motifs which were liberally borrowed from Shakespeare's comedies and German fin-

de-siècle plays.

The most militant advocate of the author's film was the cinema owner and novelist Hanns

Heinz Ewers, who with Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye made The Student of Prague (Der

Student von Prag, 1913), which, because of the motif of the double, has often been

compared to Der Andere. The Danish influence is no accident, since Nordisk was one of

the prime forces behind the Autorenfilm, producing two of the genre's most costly

ventures, Atlantis ( 1913, based on a Hauptmann novel) and Dasfremde Mädchen ('The

foreign girl', a 'dream play' specially written by Hoffmannsthal). Another firm

specializing in literary adaptations was Heinrich Bolten-Baeckers's BB-Literaria, founded

as a joint venture with Pathé, in order to exploit Pathé literary rights in Germany. Such

moves underscore the international character of the German cinema in 1913, with actors

and directors from Denmark ( Viggo Larsen, Valdemar Psilander) undoubtedly exercising

the strongest influence on domestic production, while France, Britain, and America

supplied the majority of non-German films shown in the cinemas.

GERMAN CINEMA AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The upturn and consolidation of German film production was thus already well under way

when war broke out, and the immediate effect of hostilities on the film business was

mixed. With an import embargo in force, some firms, such as PAGU, suffered substantial

losses before they were able to organize new sources of film supply. But there were also

winners for whom the confiscation of property from the foreign firms operating in

Germany, and the soaring demands for films, signalled a unique opportunity. A new

generation of producers and producer-directors made their breakthrough, after the

government had lifted the initial ban on cinema-going. Erich Pommer, a young sales

representative for the French firms Gaumont and Éclair, seized his chance and formed

Decla ('Deutsche Éclair'), which was to become the key producer of German quality

cinema after the war. Among the new firms which flourished was that of producer-

director Joe May, soon the market leader in detective serials and highly successful with

his 'Mia May films', melodramas featuring his wife. In his case, too, it was the war years

which laid the foundation of his post-war fame as Germany's chief producer of epics and

spectaculars. Similarly, the director-producer Richard Oswald, one of the most competent

professional film-makers of the 1910s, was later epitomized as 'war profiteer', when after

the abolition of censorship in 1918 he spotted a niche for his highly successful

'enlightenment films' (moralizing sex melodramas). To give an indication of the scale on

which the German film industry expanded during the war: in 1914, 25 German firms

competed with 47 foreign ones; by 1918, the relation was 130 to 10.

The quality of German films from the war years has rarely been assessed impartially.

Some featuring the war, and often dismissed as patriotic propaganda films or 'fieldgrey

kitsch', turn out to be major surprises. Thus, the films of Franz Hofer (e.g.

Weihnachtsglocken ('Christmas bells'), 1914) are stylistically sophisticated, projecting a

feel both distinctively German and free of jingoism, as they plead for self-sacrifice and

peace between the social classes. An unusual blend of melodrama and lyricism can be

found in Wenn Völker streiten (When nations quarrel', 1914) as well as several other films

which take the war as subject (such as Alfred Halm's Ihr Unteroffizier ('Their non-

commissioned officer', 1915)). Among the melodramas, the most extraordinary is Das

Tagebuch des Dr. Hart ('The diary of Dr Hart', 1916), directed by Paul Leni and funded by

BUFA, the government-owned film propaganda unit. The story of two families with split

political loyalties and crossed love interests, Das Tagebuch is an anti-tsarist propaganda

film in the guise of championing Polish nationalism. But it also makes a strongly pacifist

statement through the realistic battle scenes, the depiction of the wounded in field

hospitals, and images of rural devastation.

However, films on war subjects were the exception. Serials featuring male stars made up

the bulk of the production, with the then-famous actors Ernst Reicher, Alwin Neuss, and

Harry Lambert-Paulsen enjoying a following that allowed them single-handedly to keep

their respective companies in profit. Female serial queens like Fern Andra and Hanni

Weisse were also prolific, while directors like Joe May, Richard Oswald, Max Mack, and

Otto Rippert would make an average of six to eight films a year, moving effortlessly

between popular films (Sensationsfilme) and art films (Autorenfilme). Rippert's six-part

Homunculus, starring yet another Danish import, Olaf Fons, was the super-hit of 1916,

and Oswald's Hoffmanns Erzählungen ('Hoffmann's tales'), an adaptation of three E. T. A.

Hoffmann stories, used outdoor locations most spectacularly. Both films have been seen

as forerunners of that prototypical art cinema genre, the fantastic or 'expressionist' film,

but they belong more properly to the multi-episode Sensationsfilme, not so different from

Joe May's Veritas vincit ( 1916), which was Italian-inspired, and later parodied by Ernst

Lubitsch, who himself acted in and directed about two dozen comedies, before he had his

first international success with Madame Dubarty in 1919.

To find the origins of the fantastic film, one has to return to the Autorenfilm, whose

outstanding figure was neither Hans Heinz Ewers nor Stellan Rye, but Paul Wegener. A

celebrated Max Reinhardt actor before he came to make films, between 1913 and 1918

Wegener created the genre of the Gothic-Romantic fairy-tale film. After The Student of

Prague he acted in and co-directed The Golem ( 1920), based on a Jewish legend and the

prototype of all monster/Frankenstein/creature features. There followed Peter Schlemihl,

Riibezahl's Wedding, The Pied Piper of Hamlin, and several other films exploiting the

rich vein of German Romantic legend and fairy-tales.

Wegener's work in the 1910s is crucial for at least two reasons: he was attracted to

fantastic subjects because they allowed him to explore different cinematic techniques,

such as trick photography, superimposition, special effects in the manner of the French

detective Zigomar series, but with a sinister rather than comic motivation. For this, he

worked closely with one of the early German cinema's most creative cameramen, Guido

Seeber, himself a somewhat underrated pioneer whose many publications about the art of

cinematography, special effects, and lighting are a veritable source-book for

understanding the German style of the 1920s. But Wegener's fairy-tale films also

promoted the ingenious compromise which the Autorenfilm wanted to strike between

countering the immense hostility shown towards, the cinema by the educated middle class

(manifested in the so-called 'Kino Debatte') and exploiting what was unique about the

cinema, its popularity.

The prevalence of the fantastic in the German cinema may thus have a simpler

explanation than that given by either Lotte Eisner or Siegfried Kracauer, who enlist it as

proof of the nature of the German soul. Reviving gothic motifs and the romantic

Kunstmärchen, the fantastic film achieved a double aim: it militated for the cinema's

aesthetic legitimacy by borrowing from middlebrow Wilhelmine 'culture', but it also

broke with the international tendency of early cinema, by offering nationally identifiable

German films. Up until the Autorenfilm, film subjects and genres were quasi-universal

and international, with very little fundamental difference from country to country: film-

makers were either inspired by other popular entertainments, or they copied the successful

film subjects of their foreign rivals and domestic competitors. With the Autorenfilm, the

notion of 'national cinema' became construed in analogy to 'national literature', as well as

a certain definition of the popular, in which the rural-völkisch and the national-romantic

played an important role.

The Wegener tradition thus set a pattern which was to repeat itself throughout the 1920s:

conservative, nostalgic, and national themes contrasting sharply with the experimental

and avant-garde outlook film-makers had with regard to advancing the medium's

technical possibilities. Seeking to define a national cinema by blending a high-culture

concept of national literature with a popular pseudo-folk culture, the Wegener tradition

tried to take the wind out of the establishment's critical sails. It is the combination of both

these objectives in the fantastic film that makes it such a mainstay of the German cinema

for at least a decade (from 1913 until about 1923), suggesting that the celebrated

'expressionist film' is the tail end of this truce between highbrow culture and a lowbrow

medium, rather than a new departure. What breathed new life into the vogue was, of

course, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, mainly because of its extraordinary reception in

France (and subsequently in the United States), which in turn made producers and

directors self-consciously look for motifs that the export market would recognize as

German.

The conjunction of a boom in demand and a war economy had, by the end of the war, led

to an unsustainable number of small, undercapitalized production firms competing with

each other, some of which had tried to gain an advantage via mergers or takeovers. The

first such association of small producers was the Deutsche Lichtbild A.G. (Deulig),

formed in 1916, backed by heavy industry interests in the Ruhr, and headed by Alfred

Hugenberg, then a director of Krupp, and also owner of a newspaper and publishing

empire. One of Hugenberg's chief lieutenants, Ludwig Klitzsch, saw the advantage of

diversifying into a potentially profitable medium. He also had a veritable mission to use

the cinema as a promotional tool for both commerce and lobby politics. Klitzsch occupied

a leading function in the German Colonial League, one of the two nationally organized

initiatives-the other being the German Navy League -- which had, from about 1907

onwards, relied heavily on the cinematograph in order to promote its aims. The Navy

League especially provoked the anger of cinema exhibitors, since it provided unfair

competition by getting free advertising for its shows in the local press, and captive

audiences from school officials or local army commandants.

UFA, DECLA, AND THE WEIMAR CINEMA

The Deulig initiative led to a counter-offensive by a consortium of firms from the

electrical and chemical industries, headed by the Deutsche Bank. They were able to

persuade military circles to use the government-owned film propaganda unit, the Bild und

Film Amt (BUFA), to front a large-scale merger operation. Under considerable secrecy,

the Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa) was founded in December 1917, combining

the Messter GmbH, PAGU, Nordisk, along with a handful of smaller firms. The Reich

provided funds to buy out some of the owners, while others were offered shares in the

new company, with Paul Davidson becoming the new firm's first head of production. The

establishment of a horizontally and vertically integrated company of this size meant not

only that Deulig was dwarfed, but that a great many other middle-size companies became

increasingly dependent on Ufa as Germany's chief domestic exhibitor and export

distributor.

Neither the strategy of such a merger, nor the use of a special interest group for the

purposes of creating a film propaganda instrument, were the invention of Ufa's backers.

Both obeyed a certain commercial logic, and both belonged to the political culture of

Wilhelmine society, making Ufa an expression not so much of the war, as of a new way of

thinking about public opinion and the media in general. By the time Ufa became

operational, however, Germany had been defeated, and the new conglomerate's goal was

to dominate the domestic as well as the European film market. Its chief assets were in real

estate (extensive studio capacity, luxury cinemas all over Germany, laboratories and

prime office space in Berlin), while owning Messter brought Ufa horizontal

diversification into film equipment, processing, and other cinema-related service

industries, and the Nordisk stake both extended the exhibition basis already present from

PAGU and gave Ufa access to a world-wide export network.

Louise Brooks with Kurt Gerron in G. W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (Das Tagebuch

einer Verlorenen, 1929)

Production at first continued under the brand names of the merged firms: PAGU, Messter,

Joe May Film, Gloria, BB-Film, some using the new purpose-built studios in Babelsberg,

soon to become the heart of Ufa and the German film industry. The PAGU team around

Davidson and Lubitsch rose to international fame with a series of historical spectaculars

and costume dramas, often based on operettas (e.g. Madame Dubarry, 1919). Specializing

in exotic Großfilme (Das indische Grabmal ('The Indian Tomb'), 1920), Joe May's multi-

episode serials like Die Herrin der Welt ('The mistress of the world') proved particularly

popular to Germany's war-exhausted spectators, not least because each episode featured a

different continent, with the heroine travelling from China to Africa, from India to the

United States.

Among the firms which initially did not form part of the Ufa conglomerate, the most

important was Decla, headed by Erich Pommer. Decla's first major films after the war

were Die Spinnen ('The spiders', 1919), an exotic detective serial written and directed by

Fritz Lang, and Die Pest in Florenz ('The plague in Florence', 1919), a historical

adventure directed by Rippert and scripted by Lang.

Together with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Carl

Mayer and Hans Janowitz, these three films made up a production programme which

defined the course that the German cinema was to take in the early 1920s. Popular serials,

with exotic locations and improbable adventures, historical spectaculars, and the 'stylized'

(or 'expressionist') film were the backbone of a concept of product differentiation, carried

by such directors as Lang and Wiene, Ludwig Berger and F. W. Murnau, Carl Mayer, Carl

Froelich, and Arthur von Gerlach.

Given the decisive role of Caligari in typecasting the German cinema, it is remarkable

how unrepresentative it is of the films made during the years of the Weimar Republic. Its

explicitly 'expressionist' décor remained almost unique, and the few German films that

were able to repeat its international commercial success were each very different:

Madame Dubarry, Variete ( 1925), The Last Laugh, Metropolis. Yet in one respect

Caligari does illustrate a common pattern for the period. For in so far as one production

strand, strongly though not exclusively identified with Pommer and the Decla-Bioskop

label, has an identity as an 'art cinema', its films have a remarkably similar narrative

structure. The 'lack' which, according to narratologists, drives all stories, centres in the

Weimar cinema almost invariably on incomplete families, jealousies, overpowering father

figures, absent mothers, and often is not remedied by an attainable or desired object

choice. If one takes a dozen or so of the films still remembered, one is struck by their

explicitly Oedipal scenarios, by the recurring rivalry between fathers and sons, by

jealousy between friends, brothers, or companions. Rebellion, as Kracauer has already

pointed out, is followed by submission to the law of the fathers, but in such a way that the

rebels are haunted by their shadow, their double, their phantom selves. This cluster of

motifs can be found in Fritz Lang's Destiny and Metropolis, in Arthur Robison's Schatten

('Shadows', 1923) and Manon Lescaut ( 1926), in E. A. Dupont 's Das alte Gesetz ('The

old law', 1923) and Variete ( 1925), in Paul Leni's Waxworks ( 1924) and Hintertreppe

('Backstairs', 1921), Lupu Pick's Scherben ('Fragments', 1921) and S ylvester ( 1923),

Murnau's The Last Laugh and Phantom, in Karl Grune's Die Strasse ('The road', 1923),

and Robert Wiene's Orlacs Hände ('The hands of Orlac', 1925).

These obliquely symbolic conflicts correspond to indirect forms of narration via

flashbacks, framing devices, and nested narratives, as in Caligari, Destiny ( 1921),

Variete, Nosferatu, Zur Chronik von Grieshuus ('The chronicle of Grieshuus', 1925), and

Phantom. This often makes the films' temporal structure difficult, if not impossible, to

reconstruct, changing by that very fact the viewer's understanding of character and

motivation. At the same time, the editing often obscures rather than expresses continuity

and causal links between segments or even between shots. Hence the impression of

interiority, of the uncanny and the mysterious, since so much of the action and the

protagonists' motivation has to be guessed, presumed, or otherwise inferred.

For many of the stories of Weimar cinema one can identify sources and intertexts from

other media. Besides the folk-tales and legends already mentioned in connection with

Wegener -- to which one could add Lang's Destiny and The Nibelungen ( 1923), Ludwig

Berger's Der verlorene Schuh ('The lost shoe', 1923), and Leni Riefenstahl's Das blaue

Licht ('The blue light', 1932) -- the sources are serialized novels from newspapers ( Dr

Mabuse, Schloss Vogelöd, Phantom), middlebrow entertainment literature ( Der Gang in

die Nacht ('The walk in the night'), Variete) and adaptations of authors identified with

Germany's national literature (Goethe, Gerhard Hauptmann, Theodor Storm). These

cross-media influences are indicative of the vertical links already at that time existing

between film production and the publishing industries, suggesting that choice was

determined by economic factors, exploiting the popularity and notoriety of the material.

Yet they also continue the middlebrow, consensus-fostering, canon-forming notion of a

national cinema, borrowing from literature and a common stock of cultural references.

A particularly striking feature is that among the films most often cited as symptomatic for

the inner state of Germany, a surprising number were written by just two script-writers:

Carl Mayer and Thea von Harbou. With regard to genre and story material, it is almost

entirely their films that define the 'identity' of Weimar cinema, in particular for the period

up to 1925: Mayer's Kammerspiel- films ( Genuine, Hintertreppe, Scherben, Sylvester,

The Last Laugh, Tartüff, Vanina), and Thea von Harbou's racy adaptations of classics,

bestsellers, and national epics (all of Fritz Lang's and three Murnau films, as well as ten

by other directors).

The inordinate influence of a few individuals indicates the existence of a fairly close-knit

creative community, with the same names turning up repeatedly among the directors, the

set designers, the producers, the cameramen, and script-writers. Barely two dozen people

seem to have made up the core of the German film establishment of the early 1920s.

Largely formed around Ufa and a few other Berlin-based production companies, the

groups can be traced directly to the formation of producerdirector units around Joe May,

Richard Oswald, Fritz Lang, Friedrich W. Murnau, and the PAGU-Davidson group.

This focuses attention once more on Ufa, and Erich Pommer, who, after taking over as

Head of Production, seemed unwilling to impose the kind of central-producer system

practised by that time in Hollywood. Pommer's production concept had two salient

features. With his background in distribution (Gaumont, Éclair) and export (Decla),

Pommer -- like Davidson -- conceived of production as driven by exhibition and export.

He recognized the importance that export had for the domestic market itself, as shown in

his efforts as deputy director of the Exportverband der deutschen Filmindustrie, founded

in May 1920, to put pressure on 'the internal organisation of the market, if necessary by

sidestepping the people who currently feel themselves to be in charge of the German film

business' ( Jacobsen 1989 ).

Madame Dubarry in the USA and Caligari in Europe were the two export successes which

broke the international boycott of German films. On their basis, Pommer developed his

concept of product differentiation, trying to service two markets: the international mass

audiences, firmly in the hands of Hollywood, and the international art-cinema outlets,

where what he called the 'stylized film' generated the prestige which became linked to the

German cinema. Yet the initial export successes were greatly facilitated by hyperinflation,

since depreciation automatically amortized a film's production cost: in 1921, for instance,

the sale of a feature film to a single market like Switzerland earned enough hard currency

to finance an entire new production. But with the stabilization of the Mark in 1923, this

trading advantage disappeared for German production, and Pommer's twin strategy

became increasingly precarious.

In response Pommer tried to establish a common European film market dominated by

Germany and Ufa. He entered into a number of distribution and co-production agreements

under the banner 'Film Europe', demonstrating his awareness that, despite its size and

concentration, Ufa on its own was in no position to brave Hollywood even in Europe, not

to mention penetrating the US market. Despite its ultimate failure, the Film Europe

initiatives laid the groundwork for the very extensive contacts that were to exist

throughout the late 1920s and lasting well into the 1940s, between the German and

French and British film-making communities.

Until 1926, when he left for the United States, Pommer's original production system at

Ufa remained the directorunit system, giving his teams, most of which dated from the

Decla-Bioskop period, great creative freedom. The benefits of this policy are well known:

they made up the grandeur of the so-called Ufa style, with scope for technical and stylistic

experimentation and improvisation at almost every stage of a project. This led to heavy

reliance on studio-work, which Ufa's admirers thought 'atmospheric', and others merely

'claustrophobic'.

There were drawbacks, too: often it seemed that, with perfectionism and the craft ethos

permeating all departments, time and money were no object. Furthermore, the refusal to

divide and control the labour processes of film production as was standard practice in

Hollywood often came into conflict with a production policy geared towards exhibition

schedules. Given the German film industry's chronic over-production, few of Ufa's more

expensive films could be fully exploited, making Pommer's production concept deficit-

prone, and, as illustrated by the loan and distribution agreement concluded with US

majors (the Parufamet Agreement), ultimately fatal to Ufa's fortunes as a manufacturing

company run on industrial lines with commercial imperatives. The aesthetic and stylistic

results of Pommer's concept, on the other hand, were more lasting: revolutionary

techniques in special effects ( Destiny, Faust, Metropolis), new styles of lighting

( Phantom, the Kammerspiel films), camera movement and camera angles ( Variete and

The Last Laugh), and set design fully integrated into style and theme (as in Die

Nibelungen). These achievements gave Ufa film technicians and directors their high

professional reputation, making the German cinema of the 1920s, paradoxically, both a

financial disaster and a film-makers' Mecca (Hitchcock's admiration for Murnau,

Bufiuel's for Lang, not to mention the influences on Joseph von Sternberg, Rouben

Mamoulian, Orson Welles, and on Hollywood film noir of the 1940s).

Yet fending off American competition was not the only front on which the German

cinema did battle in the 1920s, and, while it dominated exhibition, Ufa did not make up

much more than 18 per cent of the national production. The smaller firms not distributing

via Ufa, such as Emelka, Deulig, Südfilm, Terra, and Nero, tried to maintain their own

exhibition network by entering into agreements with American and British firms, thus

further splitting the German market, to the ultimate advantage of Hollywood.

As a capitalist conglomerate, Ufa was the target of critics on the left, foremost among

them writers from the liberal and social-democratic press, whose cultural distrust of the

cinema was hardly less pronounced than that of their conservative colleagues, but for

whom Ufa was clearly a tool in the hands of the nationalist right. The feuilleton critics

also showed a somewhat contradictory attitude to the popular: denouncing 'artistic' films

as 'Kitsch', they despised popular or genre films as 'Schund', thus operating a concept of

film art where in the mid-1920s only Chaplin and in the late 1920s only the Soviet cinema

could pass muster.

The predominantly critical attitude of the intelligentsia towards both the nation's art

cinema and commercial cinema led to another paradox: discussions about the cinema, its

cultural function, and aesthetic specificity as an art form were conducted at a high level of

intellectual and philosophical sophistication, giving rise to theoreticians and critics of

distinction: among them Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Siegfried Kracauer. Even

daily journalism produced outstanding essays by Willy Haas, Hans Siemsen, Herbert

Jhering, Kurt Tucholsky, and Hans Feld.

Another group to interest themselves ideologically in the cinema were professional

pedagogues, lawyers, doctors, and the clergy of both Protestant and Catholic

denominations. As early as 1907 they promoted debates about the dangers of the cinema

for youth, work-discipline, morals, and public order, the so-called 'anti-dirtand-smut

campaign'. The aim was not to ban the cinema, but to promote cultural' films, that is,

educational and documentary cinema, as opposed to fictional film narratives.

POST-WAR FERMENT

After the war, the strict Wilhelmine censorship was abolished, but, given the climate of

revolutionary ferment and sexual licence, the industry soon found itself under fire once

more, and film-makers had few friends who defended their freedom of expression when

parliament reimposed partial censorship in May 1920: even Bertolt Brecht thought that

the 'capitalist smut-merchants' had to be taught a lesson. What caused more serious

divisions inside the film industry was the local entertainment taxes levied on cinemas and

depressing their economic viability. At the same time, legislation adopted to protect

national producers from Hollywood competition was as ingenious as it was ultimately

ineffectual: if import restrictions and quota regulations (the so-called Kontingentsystem)

helped boost production of 'quota-quickies', they also not only hurt distributors wanting

American films for their audiences, but aggravated the glut of films generally. In other

respects, too, politicians wielded only a blunt instrument: although the government

occasionally banned uncomfortable films on the grounds that their showing might

threaten public order (as happened in Berlin in the case of Battleship Potemkin, 1925, and

All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930), it could do little to foster a prosperous and united

national film business, since import restrictions and the entertainment tax invariably

played one section of film industry (the producers) off against another (the exhibitors).

There is, then, a Weimar intellectual legacy which, although hostile to German films,

none the less helped to foster an informed, discriminating, and heavily politicized film

culture, implied in the term 'Weimar cinema'. Although the film business was

ideologically and economically embattled, it was also a political fact, not only because it

appealed to the government for assistance, but because both the intellectual-liberal and

the anti-democratic forces took the cinema seriously.

The organized radical left was, throughout most of the decade, almost uniformly hostile

towards the cinema, lambasting Ufa for poisoning the minds of the masses with

reactionary celebrations of Prussia's glory (e.g. Die Tänzerin Barberina ('The dancer

Barberina') by Carl Boese, 1921 and Fredericus Rex by Arzen von Czerepy, 1922), while

chiding the masses for preferring such films to party meetings and street demonstrations.

Only after the successful screening of the so-called 'Russenfilme' in 1925 did Willi

Münzenberg, the left's most gifted propagandist, find support for his slogan 'Conquer the

Cinemas', the title of a pamphlet in which he argued that films were 'one of the most

effective means of political agitation, not to be left solely in the hands of the political

enemy'. Münzenberg's International Workers' Aid set up a distribution company,

Prometheus, to import Russian film and also finance its own productions. Apart from

documentaries, Prometheus made features such as the comedy Überflüssige Menschen

('Superfluous men', 1926) by the Soviet director Alexander Razumny, and Piel Jutzi's

proletarian melodrama Mutter Krauses Fahrt ins Glück ('Mother Krause's journey to

fortune', 1929). Not to be outdone by the Communists, the Social Democrats also

financed feature films, among them Werner Hochbaum's Brüder ('Brothers', 1929) and

several documentaries dealing with housing problems, anti-abortion legislation, and urban

crime. Earlier, the trade unions had sponsored Die Schmiede by Martin Berger ('The

forge', 1924), who also made Freies Volk ('Free people'), in 1925 and Kreuzzug des

Weibes ('Woman's crusade'), in 1926. However, Prometheus' best-known film was Kuhle

Wampe ( 1932), directed by Slatan Dudow from a script by Bertolt Brecht, which opens

with the suicide of an unemployed adolescent, and follows the fortunes of a young

working-class couple as they try to find jobs and a home in order to found a family,

finally realizing that only when marching with their fellow workers can they change the

world, and thus improve their own fate.

Very rarely did films with a party-political affiliation succeed in providing what critics

missed in almost all Ufa productions: 'realism', and a commitment to topics taken from

everyday life. Such a demand, comprehensible from a critical establishment still under the

impact of literary naturalism, was none the less not always compatible with the export

objectives pursued by Pommer. Abroad, the reality of Germany was still too much

associated with the World War for subjects with a contemporary setting to appeal to

international audiences. While before 1918 the German cinema extensively utilized

locations, realistic décor, and contemporary themes, after the war it was mainly

productions intended for the domestic market (comedies, social dramas, or Harry Piel

adventure films) which resorted to realist settings. Most of the prestige productions that

later became associated with the realism known as 'Neue Sachlichkeit', whether those by

G. W. Pabst ( Joyless Street (Die freudlose Gasse), 1925; Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney ('The

love of Jeanne Ney'), 1927; Pandora's Box) or Joe May ( Asphalt), remained, until the

coming of sound, wedded to the Ufa studio look, regardless of the period in which the

action was set.

THE END OF WEIMAR CINEMA

In the United States, by contrast, the complaint against German films was the absence of

strong plots, clear conflicts, but, above all, the absence of stars. The star system has

always been fundamental for international filmmaking, partly because the qualities and

connotations of a star transcend national boundaries in a way that setting and subject-

matter often do not. One of the problems Ufa encountered in this respect was that, as soon

as it developed stars, they tended to be wooed to Hollywood, following the example of

Lubitsch's first international discovery, Pola Negri. The only truly international star in the

1920s who also worked in Germany was Emil Jannings, and he was indeed a

commanding presence in a disproportionate number of Germany's American successes:

Madame Dubarry, Variete, The Last Laugh, The Blue Angel. Attempts to launch

international stars by importing American actresses in the latter part of the 1920s were

only intermittently successful. Louise Brooks never became popular in the 1920s, Anna

May Wong (directed by E. A. Dupont and Richard Eichberg) failed to catch the attention

of American audiences, nor did Betty Amann -- Pommer's American 'discovery' for May's

Asphalt -- develop her star potential. The cast of Murnau's Faust ( 1926, with Emil

Jannings, Yvette Guilbert, Gösta Ekman) was deliberately international, but the fact that

Camilla Horn was given the role of Gretchen, originally offered to Lillian Gish (to echo

her success in Griffith's Way down East, 1920, and Broken Blossoms, 1919), did not help

these transatlantic ambitions. It is even more remarkable that none of Fritz Lang's leading

men or women (including Brigitte Helm) ever became an international star. When he and

Pommer visited Hollywood, Lang was apparently irritated by Douglas Fairbanks insisting

that what mattered in American picturemaking was the performer, not the set, nor the

originality of the subject. Only with the coming of sound -and when importing an

American director like Josef von Sternberg -- did Ufa develop successful stars, such as

Marlene Dietrich, Hans Albers, Lilian Harvey, Willy Fritsch, or Marika Rökk, all of them

closely modelled on American stars of the early 1930s.

By that time, the fortunes of the German cinema as a national and international cinema

had become even more closely allied to the fate of Ufa. Following severe losses in 1926

and 1927, the company's major creditor, Deutsche Bank, was prepared to force Ufa into

receivership, unless new outside capital could be found. Alfred Hugenberg, thwarted in

his ambitions when Ufa was first set up in 1917, seized his chance and acquired majority

holdings. His new director, Ludwig Klitzsch, set about restructuring the company,

following the Hollywood studio system. He introduced American management principles,

separating the finance department from production, reorganizing distribution, and hiving

off some of the subsidiary companies. Klitzsch thus brought to Ufa the central producer

system, overseen by Ernst Hugo Correll, who divided production up between different

heads of production (Produktionsleiter such as Günther Stapenhorst, Bruno Duday, and

Erich Pommer), thereby achieving both greater central control and greater division of

labour. If the Hugenberg take-over sealed the fate of Ufa ideologically, as most

commentators have argued, it is equally true that, from a business perspective, it was

thanks to Klitzsch that for the first time Ufa was run along strictly commercial lines.

The Klitzsch regime allowed Ufa, with remarkable speed, to catch up with the major

international developments, such as the introduction of sound, which the previous

management had been very slow to take an interest in. Ufa converted to sound production

within little more than a year, while the company was also able to avoid costly

competition by agreeing terms with its major domestic rival, Tobis Klangfilm. From

1930-1 onwards, Ufa once more began to show profit, not least because it proved a

successful exporter, aggressively marketing its foreignlanguage versions in France and

Great Britain, in addition to exploiting its gramophone and sheet music interest. However,

it was not with its star directors of the 1920s that Ufa achieved financial recovery:

Murnau had left for Hollywood early in 1927, Lang and Pabst were working for Seymour

Nebenzahl's Nero Film, while Dupont was working in Britain, as was Carl Mayer, who

after following Murnau to Hollywood had settled in London in 1931. Efficient genre

directors such as Karl Hartl, Gustav Ucicky, and above all Hanns Schwarz put Ufa back

in the black, the latter with six films, among them some of the biggest box-office

successes until then: Bomben auf Monte Carlo ('Bombs on Monte Carlo', 1931),

Einbrecher ('Burglar', 1930), Ungarische Rhapsodie ('Hungarian rhapsody', 1928), and

Die wunderbare Liige der Nina Petrowna ('Nina Petrowna's wonderful lie', 1929).

Musicals and comedies became the mainstay of the internationally minded German

cinema, with super-productions like Der Kongress tanzt ('The Congress Dances', 1931),

star vehicles like Die Drei von der Tankstelle ('Three from the petrol station', 1930),

screwball comedies like Viktor und Viktoria ( 1933), and domestic melodramas like

Abschied ('Departure') conveying quite a different image of the German cinema from that

of the 1920s. Even before the Nazi take-over in 1933 the transformations of the German

film industry from a twintrack 'artistic film'/prestige production cinema to a mainstream

entertainment cinema were well under way, forced by economic necessity and

technological change even more than by political interference. While the migration of

personnel to Hollywood, begun with Ernst Lubitsch in 1921 and followed by Murnau,

Dupont, and Leni, had also gathered pace by 1927-8, its motives were, at least until 1933,

personal and professional as much as political.

The German cinema on the eve of Hitler's rise to power confronts one with a paradox: the

narrative which attributes the rise of this cinema to the flourishing of talent in the creative

ferment of the Weimar Republic must perforce see its cinema enter into decline, as the

Republic disintegrates under the blows of the nationalist and Fascist right. The evidence,

however, does not bear this out, since if decline there was, it was due to the drain of talent

away to the richer pastures of Hollywood. If, on the other hand, one takes economic

performance as an indicator of success, it was only during the political upheavals of the

Republic's final years that the German film industry matured into a financially viable

business. Elsewhere in Europe, too, the days of an innovative art cinema were strictly

limited; what is remarkable about the German cinema is how long these days lasted right

at the heart of a commercial enterprise, which by its very nature should not have been

able to afford them at all.

Bibliography

Bock, Hans-Michael, and Töteberg, Michael, (eds.) ( 1992), Das UfaBuch.

Cherchi Paolo Usai, and Codelli, Lorenzo (eds.) ( 1990), Before Caligari.

Eisner, Lotte ( 1969). The Haunted Screen.

Jacobsen, Wolfgang ( 1989). Erich Pommer.

---, Kaes, Anton, and Prinzler, Hans Helmut (eds.) ( 1993), Geschichte des deutschen

Films.

Kracauer, Siegfried ( 1947), From Caligari to Hitler.

Kreimeier, Klaus ( 1992), Die Ufa-Story.

Lamprecht, Gerhard ( 1976-80), Deutsche Stummfilme, 1903-1931.

Murray, Bruce ( 1990), Film and the German Left.

Petley, Julian ( 1979), Capital and Culture.

Petro, Patrice ( 1989), Joyless Streets.

Plummer, T., et al. ( 1982), Film and Politics in the Weimar Republic.

Rentschler, Eric (ed.) ( 1986), German Film and Literature.

Erich Pommer (1889-1966)

Erich Pommer was the most important person in the German and European film industries

of the 1920s and 1930s. He worked in Berlin, Hollywood, Paris, and London -

discovering talents, and forming technical and artistic teams which created some of the

most important films of Weimar cinema. He also introduced Hollywood production

systems to the European film industry, and was responsible for attempts to rebuild the

West Germa film after the Second World War. Pommer entered the film industry in 1907.

By 1913 he had become general representative of the French Éclair company for central

Europe. When war broke out, Éclair was put under forced administration by the German

government. To rescue his his business interests Pommer founded Decla (derived from

'Deutsche Eclair'). While Pommer served in the Prussian army, the new company,

managed in Berlin by his wife Gertrud and his brother Albert, successfully produced

comedies and melodramas for the booming German movie business.After Pommer's

return, the films became more artistically ambitious. At the end of 1919 a mixture of

commercial thrift, artistic daring, simple décor, and clever advertising strategy resulted in

the creation of a film legend: Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari ( 1919).In March 1920 Decla

merged with Deutsche-Bioscop. Pommer concentrated his activities on export - a crucial

aspect of film production in a period of economic crisis and booming inflation. A year

later the company was taken over by Ufa but continued to produce under the brand name

'Decla-Bioscop'. In 1923 he became head of Ufa's three production companies at the

studios in Neubabelsberg. There he tried to realize his vision of creative production,

combining art and business to create a total art form. Acting as executive producer, he

initiated big prestige productions aimed at the international market. Directors F. W.

Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ludwig Berger, Arthur Robison, and E. A. Dupont, writers Carl

Mayer, Thea von Harbou, and Robert Liebmann, cinematographers Karl Freund, Carl

Hoffmann, Fritz Arno Wagner, and Günther Rittau, art directors Robert Herlth and Walter

Röhrig, Otto Hunte, and Erich Kettelhut formed the reservoir of manpower from which

Pommer formed lasting artistic teams. They created film classics such as Destiny (Der

müde Tod, 1921), Dr. Mabuse ( 1922), Phantom ( 1922), Die Nibelungen ( 1924), Die

Finanzen des Grossherzogs ( 1923), The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, 1924), Tartüff

( 1925), Variete ( 1925), Metropolis ( 1925), and Manon Lescaut ( 1926).Employing

foreign talent, such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Dinesen, Benjamin Christensen, and

Holger-Madsen from Denmark, and Herbert Wilcox, Alfred Hitchcock, and Graham Cutts

Great Britain, Pommer tried to strengthen international co-operation in what he called

'Film Europe' - a European force working against the American domination of the world

film market. Pommer's way of allowing his production teams great creative freedom to

perform their artistic and technical experiments led to over-extended budgets and

contributed to Ufa's growing financial crisis. When Pommer left Ufa in January 1926,

Lang's Metropolis was in its sixth month of production and would take another year to be

ready for release. Pommer went to Hollywood, where he produced two films for

Paramount with former Ufa star Pola Negri. But he had problems adapting to the

Hollywood system, and argued with the studio bosses.In 1928 Ufa's new studio head

Ludwig Klitzsch lured Pommer back to Babelsberg, where his production group was

given top priority to produce sound films. Combining his European and American

experience, he hired the Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg to direct Emil Jannings

in The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel, 1930): an international film for the world market.

Pommer employed new talents such as the brothers Robert and Kurt Siodmak, and Billie

(later Billy) Wilder. He pioneered the genre of film operetta with films like Erik Charell's

The Congress Dances (Der Kongress tanzt, 1931).When the Nazis took power in 1933

and Ufa ousted most of its Jewish employees, Pommer emigrated to Paris, where he set

up a European production facility for Fox, for which he produced two films - Max

Ophuls's On a volé un homme ( 1933) and Fritz Lang's Liliom ( 1934). After a brief

period in Hollywood he moved to London to work with Korda. In 1937 he founded

Mayflower Pictures with actor Charles Laughton, whom he directed in Vessel of Wrath

( 1938). Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn ( 1939) was their last production before the Second

World War broke out and Pommer went to Hollywood for the third time. He produced

Dorothy Arzner's Dance, Girl, Dance for RKO but his studio contract was cancelled

following a heart attack.In 1946 Pommer (an American citizen since 1944) returned to

Germany as Film Production Control Officer. His tasks were to organize the re-

establishment of a German film industry and the rebuilding of destroyed studios, and to

supervise the denazification of film-makers. But Pommer found his position difficult,

caught between the interests of the American industry and his desire to reconstruct an

independent German cinema. In 1949 his duties on behalf of the Allies ended. He stayed

in Munich, working with old colleagues from Ufa such as Hans Albers, and new talents

such as Hildegard Knef. He produced a few films until the failure of the anti-war picture

Kinder, Mütter und ein General ( 1955) let to the collapse of his Intercontinental-Film. In

1956 Pommer, whose health was declining, retired to California, where he died in 1966.

HANS-MICHAEL BOCKBIBLIOGRAPHY

Bock, Hans-Michael, and Töteberg, Michael (eds.) 1992), das Ufa-Buch.

Hardt, Ursula ( 1993), Erich Pommer: Film Producer for Germany.

Jacobsen, Wolfgang ( 1989), Erich Pommer: Ein Produzent macht Filmgeschichte.

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931)

Faust ( 1926)

One of the most gifted visual artists of the silent cinema, F. W. Murnau made twenty-one

films between 1919 and 1931, first in Berlin, later in Hollywood, and finally in the South

Seas. He died prematurely in a car accident in California at the age of 42. Born Friedrich

Wilhelm Plumpe in Bielefeld, Germany, Murnau grew up in a cultured environment. As a

child, he immersed himself in literary classics and staged theatrical productions with his

sister and brothers. At the University of Heidelberg, where he studied art history and

literature, he was spotted by Max Reinhardt in a student play and offered free training at

Reinhardt's school in Berlin. When the war began in 1914, he enlisted in the infantry and

fought on the Eastern Front. In 1916 he transferred to the air force and was stationed near

Verdun, where he was one of the few from his company to survive.

In Nosferatu ( 1921), Murnau creates some of the most vivid images in German

expressionist cinema. Nosferatu's shadow ascending the stairs towards the woman who

awaits him evokes an entire era and genre of filmmaking. Based on Bram Stoker's

Dracula, Murnau's Nosferatu is a 'symphony of horror' in which the unnatural penetrates

the ordinary world, as when Nosferatu's ship glides into the harbour with its freight of

coffins, rats, sailors' corpses, and plague. The location shooting used so effectively by

Murnau was rarely seen in German films at this time. For Lotte Eisner ( 1969), Murnau

was the greatest of the expressionist directors because he was able to evoke horror outside

the studio. Special effects accompany Nosferatu, but because no effect is repeated exactly,

each instance delivers a unique charge of the uncanny. The sequence that turns to negative

after Nosferatu's coach carries Jonathan across the bridge toward the vampire's castle is

quoted by Cocteau in Orphé and Godard in Alphaville. Max Schreck as Nosferatu is a

passive predator, the very icon of cinematic Expressionism.

The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, 1924), starring Emil Jannings, is the story of an old

man who loses his job as doorman at a luxury hotel. Unable to face his demotion to a

menial position, the man steals a uniform and continues to dress with his usual ceremony

for his family and neighbours, who watch him come and go from their windows. When

his theft is discovered, his story would end in tragedy were it not for an epilogue in which

he is awakened, as if from a dream, to news that he has inherited a fortune from an

unknown man he has befriended. Despite the happy ending required by the studio, this

study of a man whose self-image has been taken away from him is the story of the

German middle class during the ruinous inflation of the mid-1920s. Critics around the

world marvelled at the 'unbound' (entfesselte), moving camera expressing his subjective

point of view. Murnau used only one intertitle in the film, aspiring to a universal visual

language.

For Eric Rohmer, Faust ( 1926) was Murnau's greatest artistic achievement because in it

all other elements were subordinated to mise-en-scène. In The Last Laugh and Tartüff

( 1925), architectural form (scenic design) took precedence, Faust was the most pictorial

(hence, cinematic) of Murnau's films because in it form (architecture) was subordinated to

light (the essence of cinema). The combat between light and darkness was its very

subject, as visualized in the spectacular 'Prologue in Heaven'. 'It is light that models form,

that sculpts it. The film-maker allows us to witness the birth of a world as true and

beautiful as painting, the art which has revealed the truth and beauty of the visible world

to us through the ages' ( Rohmer 1977 ). Murnau's homosexuality, which was not

acknowledged publicly, must have played a role in a aestheticizing and eroticzing the

body of the young Faust.

Based on the phenomenal success of The Last Laugh, Murnau was invited to Hollywood

by William Fox. He was given complete authority on Sunrise ( 1927), which he shot with

his technical team in his accustomed manner, with elaborate sets, complicated location

shooting, and experiments with visual effects. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is about

sin and redemption. A femme fatale from the city (dressed in black satin like the arch-

tempter Mephisto in Faust) comes to the country, where she seduces a man and nearly

succeeds in getting him to drown his wife before he recovers himself and tries to recreate

the simplicity and trust of their lost happiness. Sunrise overwhelmed critics with its sheer

beauty and poetry, but its costs far exceeded its earnings and it was to be the last film

Murnau made within a production system which allowed him real control. His subequent

films for Fox, Four devils and City Girl, were closely supervised by the studio. Murnau's

decisions could be overridden by others, and in his eyes both films were severely

damaged. None the less, City Girl should be appreciated on its own terms as a moral fable

in which the landscape (fields of wheat) is endowed with exquisite pastoral beauty that

turns dark and menacing, as in Nosferatu, Faust, and Tabu.In 1929 Murnau set sail with

Robert Flaherty for the South Seas to make a film about western traders who ruin a

simple island society. Wanting more dramatic structure than Flaherty, Murnau directed

Tabu ( 1931) alone. It begins in 'Paradise', where young men and women play in lush,

tropical pools of water. Reri and Matahi are in love. Nature and their community are in

harmony. Soon after, Reri is dedicated to the gods and declared tabu. Anyone who looks

at her with desire must be killed. Matahi escapes with her. 'Paradise Lost' chronicles the

inevitability of their ruin, represented by the Elder, who hunts them, and by the white

traders, who trap Matahi with debt, forcing him to transgress a second tabu in defying the

shark guarding the black pearl that can buy escape from the island. In the end, Matahi

wins against the shark but cannot reach the boat carrying Reri away. It moves across the

water as decisively as Nosferatu's ship, its sail resembling the shark's fin. Murnau died

before Tabu's premiére.JANET BERGSTROMFILMOGRAPHY Note: Starred titles are

no longer extant.* Der Knabe in Blau (Der Todessmarged) ( 1919); * Satanas ( 1919); *

Sehnsucht ( 1920); * Der Bucklige und die Tänzerin ( 1920); * Der Januskopf ( 1920); *

Abend-Nacht-Morgen ( 1920); Der Gang in die Nacht ( 1920); * Marizza, genannt die

Schmugglermadonna ( 1921); Schloss Vogelöd ( 1921); Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des

Grauens ( 1921); Der brennende Acker ( 1922); Phantom ( 1922); * Die Austreibung

( 1923); Die Finanzen des Großherzogs ( 1923); Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh)

( 1924); Herr Tartüff / Tartüff ( 1925); Faust ( 1926); Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

( 1927); * Four Devils ( 1928); City Girl ( 1930); Tabu ( 1931)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eisner, Lotte ( 1969), The Haunted Screen.

-- ( 1973), Murnau.

Göttler, Fritz, et al. ( 1990), Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.

Rohmer. Eric ( 1977), L'Organisation de l'espace dans le 'Faust' de Murnau.

Robert Herlth (1893-1962)

Set design by Robert Herlth for the Ufa production Amphitryon ( 1935), directed by

Reinhold Schünzel

Robert Herlth, the son of a brewer, studied painting in Berlin before the First World War.

Drafted into the army in 1914, he was befriended by the painter and set designer Hermann

Warm, who helped his spend the last two years of the war at the army theatre in Wilna

and away from the front.

After the War, Warm became head of the art department at Erich Pommer's Decla-

Bioscop, and in 1920 he invited Herlth to join his team. Together with Walter Reimann

and Walter Röhrig, Warm had just created the 'expressionist' décors of Das Cabinett des

Dr Caligari ( 1919). When working on F. W. Murnau's Schloss Vogelöd ( 1921) and the

Chinese episode of Fritz Lang's Destiny ( Der müde Tod, 1921). Herlth was introduced to

Röhrig, and the two were to form a team lasting nearly fifteen years, mainly at the Decla-

Bioscop studios that were expanded by Ufa into the most important production centre in

Europe.

This was the time when, under the guidance of producer Erich Pommer, teams of set

designers and cinematographers laid the foundations on which the glory of Weimar

cinema was based.

The oppressive, dark, medieval interiors for Pabst's Der Schatz ( 1922-3) were among the

first collaborations of Herlth and Röhrig, who went on to design three films that form the

peak of German film-making in the 1920s; Murnau's The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann,

1924), Tartüff ( 1925), and Faust ( 1926). They were involved with the productions from

the early planning stages with Murnau, 'Film-Dichter' Carl Mayer, and cinematographer

Karl Freund, Together they created the concept of the camera unbound' (entfesselte

Kamera) and cinematic mixture of actors, lighting, and décor that is typical of these films.

Léon Barsacq ( 1976) writes: 'The sets are reduced to the essential, sometimes to a ceiling

and a mirror. In his initial sketches Herlth, influenced by Murnau, began by roughing in

characters as they were positioned in a particular scene; then the volume of the set seemed

to create itself. Thus interiors became simpler and simpler, barer and barer, Despite the

simplification, all the tricks of set design and camera movements were utilized, and some

times invented, for this film [ The Last Laugh]. Scale models on top of actual buildings

made it possible to give a vertigionous height to the façade of the Grand Hotel.'

Towards the end of the silent period Herlth and Röhrig joined forces for one of Ufa's best

films, Joe May's Asphalt ( 1928). They built a Berlin street crossing complete with shops,

cars, and buses, using the former Zeppelin hangar-turned-film-studio at Staaken. After the

introduction of sound they stayed with the Pommer team at Ufa, working with some of

his young talents such as Robert Siodmak and Anatole Litvak and also creating the lavish

period sets for the opulent and very successful multilingual versions of operettas such as

Erik Charell's Der Kongress tanzt ( 1931) and Ludwig Berger's Walzerkreig ( 1933).In

1929 they started a collaboration with the director Gustav Ucicky which afforded them a

smooth transition into the Ufa of the Nazi period. Ucicky, a former cinematographer and

reliable craftsman, specialized in entertainment with a nationalistic touch, and Herlth and

Röhrig were able to avoid the hard propaganda films by working on popular

entertainment. In 1935 they designed the Greek temples for Reinhold Schünzel's satirical

comedy Amphitryon ( 1935), which mocked the pseudo-classical architecture of Albert

Speer's Nazi buildings. Michael Esser describes their concept: 'Set design doesn't create

copies of real buildings; it brings found details into a new context. Their relation to the

originals is a distancing one, often even an ironic one.'In 1935 Herlth and Röhrig wrote,

designed, and directed the fairy-tale Hans im Glück. Shortly afterwards the collaboration

ended.After constructing the technical buildings for Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia ( 1938).

Herlth (whose wife was Jewish) worked for Tobis, then Terra, designing mainly

entertainment films. His first production in colour was Bolvary's operetta Die Fledermaus,

which was shot in winter 1944-5 and released after the was by DEFA.After the war Herlth

first worked as stage designer for theatres in Berlin. In 1947 he designed the ruins of a

Grand Hotel for Harald Braun's Zwischen gestern und morgen ( 1947). Throughout the

1950s he was again mainly involved with entertainment films made by the better directors

of the period such as Rolf Hansen and Kurt Hoffman. For one of his last big productions,

Alfred Weidenmann's two-part adaptation of Thomas Mann's Die Buddenbrooks ( 1959)

(designed in collaboration with his younger brother Kurt Herlth and Arno Richter) Robert

Herlth was awarded a 'Deutscher Filmpreis'.HANS-MICHAEL BOCKSELECT

FILMOGRAPHY Der Schatz ( 1923); The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann) ( 1924); Tartüff

( 1925); Faust ( 1926); Asphalt ( 1928); The Congress Dances (Der Kongress tanzt)

( 1931); Amphitryon ( 1935); Hans im glück ( 1936); Olympia ( 1938); Kleider machen

Leute ( 1940); Die Fledermaus ( 1945); Die Buddenbrooks ( 1959)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barsacq, Léon ( 1976), Caligari's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions.

Herlth, Robert ( 1979), 'Dreharben mit Murnau'.

Längsfeld, Wolfgang (ed.) ( 1965), Filmarchitektur Robert Herlth.

The Scandinavian Style

PAOLO CHERCHI USAI

For a brief period after 1910, the countries of Scandinavia, despite their low population

(less than 2.5 million in Denmark in 1901; around 5 million in Sweden in 1900) and their

marginal place in the western economic system, played a major role in the early evolution

of cinema, both as an art and as an industry. Their influence was concentrated into two

phases: the first centred on Denmark in the four-year period 1910-13, which saw the

international success of the production company Nordisk Film Kompagni; and the second

on Sweden between 1917 and 1923. And, far from consisting of an isolated blossoming of

local culture, Scandinavian silent cinema was extensively integrated into a wider

European context. For at least ten years the aesthetic identity of Danish and Swedish films

was intimately related to that of Russian and German cinema, each evolving in symbiotic

relation to the others, linked by complementary distribution strategies and exchanges of

directors and technical expertise. Within this network of co-operation only a marginal role

was played by the other northern European nations. Finland, which did have a

linguistically independent cinema, remained largely an adjunct of tsarist Russia until

1917. Iceland -- part of Denmark until 1918 -- only saw its first film theatre opened in

1906, by the future director Alfred Lind. And Norway produced only seventeen fiction

titles, from its first film Fiskerlivets farer: et drama på havet ('The perils of fishing: a

drama of the sea', 1908) until 1918.

ORIGINS

The first display of moving pictures in Scandinavia took place in Norway on 6 April 1896

at the Variété Club in Oslo (or Christiania as it was then called) and was organized by two

pioneers of German cinema, the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky. Such was the

success of their show, and of their Bioskop projection equipment, that they stayed on until

5 May. In Denmark, the earliest documented moving picture show was put on by the

painter Vilhelm. Pacht, who installed a Lumière Cinématographe in the wooden pavilion

of the Raadhusplasen in Copenhagen on 7 June 1896. The equipment and the pavilion

were both destroyed in a fire started by a recently sacked electrician out for revenge, but

the show was relaunched on 30 June to a fanfare of publicity. Even the royal family had

visited Pacht's Kinopticon on 11 June.

The arrival of cinema in Finland followed a few weeks on from its first appearance in St

Petersburg on 16 May. Although the Lumière Cinématographe remained in the Helsinki

town hall for only eight days after opening on 28 June, owing to the high prices of seats

and the relatively small size of the city, the photographer Karl Emil Stählberg was

inspired to take action. He took on the distribution of Lumière films from January 1897,

and outside Helsinki the 'living pictures' were made available through the exhibitor Oskar

Alonen. In 1904, Stählberg set up in Helsinki the first permanent cinema in Finland, the

Maailman YmpÁri ('Around the world'). In the same year were produced the first 'real-

life' sequences, but it is not clear whether or not StÁhlberg was also responsible for these.

On 28 June 1896 the Industrial Exhibition at the Summer Palace in Malmö hosted the first

projection in Sweden, again with Lumière material, organized by the Danish showman

Harald Limkilde. The Cinématographe spread north a few weeks afterwards, when a

correspondent of the Parisian daily Le Soir, Charles Marcel, presented films with the

Edison Kinetoscope on 21 July at the Victoria Theatre, Stockholm, in the Glace Palace of

the Djurgärten. They were not a great success, however, and the Edison films were soon

supplanted by the Skladanowsky brothers, who shot some sequences at Djurgärten itself:

these were the first moving pictures to be shot in Sweden.

A scene from Häxan (Witchcraft through the Ages), made in Sweden in 1921 by the

Danish director Benjamin Christensen

FINLAND

The first Finnish film company, Pohjola, began distributing films in 1899 under the

direction of a circus impresario, J. A. W. Grönroos. The first location officially designated

for the projection of films was the Kinematograf International, opened at the end of 1901.

But, like the two other cinemas which opened shortly afterwards, it survived for only a

few weeks, and it was not until Karl Emil Stählberg's initiative in 1904 that film theatres

were definitively established on a permanent basis. In 1911 there were 17 cinemas in

Helsinki, and 81 in the rest of the country. By 1921, the figures had risen to 20 and 118

respectively.

The first Finnish fiction film, Salaviinanpolttajat ('Bootleggers'), was directed in 1907 by

the Swede Louis Sparre assisted by Teuvo Puro, an actor with Finland's National Theatre,

for the production company Atelier Apollo, run by Stählberg. In the following ten years,

Finland produced another 27 fiction films and 312 documentary shorts, as well as two

publicity films. Stählberg's near monopoly on production -- between 1906 and 1913 he

distributed 110 shorts, around half the entire national production -- was short-lived.

Already in 1907 the Swede David Fernander and the Norwegian Rasmus Hallseth had

founded the Pohjoismaiden Biografi Komppania, which produced forty-seven shorts in

little more than a decade. The Swedish cameraman on Salaviinanpolttajat, Frans

Engström, split with Stählberg and set up -- with little success -his own production

company with the two protagonists of the film, Teuvo Puro and Teppo Raikas. An extant

fragment of Sylvi ( 1913), directed by Puro, constitutes the earliest example of Finnish

fiction film preserved today. Greater success awaited Erik Estlander, who founded

Finlandia Filmi (forty-nine films between 1912 and 1916, including some shorts shot in

the extreme north of the country), and the most important figure of the time, Hjalmar V.

Pohjanheimo, who from 1910 onwards began to acquire several film halls, and soon

turned to production. The films distributed by Pohjanheimo under the aegis of Lyyra

Filmi were documentaries ( 1911), newsreels (from 1914), and comic and dramatic

narratives, made with the help of his sons Adolf, Hilarius, Asser, and Berger, and the

theatrical director Kaarle Halme.

The First World War brought the intervention of the Russian authorities, who in 1916

banned all cinematographic activity. The ban lapsed after the Revolution of February

1917 and was definitively removed in December when Finland declared its independence.

The post-war period was dominated by a production company founded by Puro and the

actor Erkki Karu, Suomi Filmi. Its first important feature-length film was Anna-Liisa

( Teuvo Puro and Jussi Snellman, 1922), taken from a work by Minna Canth and

influenced by Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness ( 1886): a young girl who has killed her

child is overwhelmed by remorse and confesses to expiate her crime. The actor Konrad

Tallroth, who had already been active in Finland before the war but had then emigrated to

Sweden following the banning of the film Eräs elämän murhenäytelmä ('The tragedy of a

life'), was taken on in 1922 by Suomi for Rakkauden kaikkivalta -- Amor Omnia ('Love

conquers all'), an uneven and isolated attempt to adapt Finnish cinema to the mainstream

features emerging from western Europe and the United States. Production in the

following years was limited in quantity, and tended to return to traditional themes of

everyday life, in the line of contemporary Swedish narrative and stylistic models. Judging

by accounts written at the time, only the documentary Finlandia (Erkki Karu and Eero

Leväluoma/ Suomi Filmi, 1922) achieved a certain success abroad. Around eighty silent

feature films were produced in Finland up to 1933. About forty fiction films, including

shorts, are conserved at the Suomen Elokuva-Arkisto in Helsinki.

NORWAY

The first Norwegian film company of any significance was Christiania Film Co. A/S, set

up in 1916. Before then, national production-represented by Norsk Kinematograf A/S,

Internationalt Film Kompagni A/S, Nora Film Co. A/S, and Gladtvet Film -- had been in

an embryonic stage. Fewer than ten fiction films had been produced between 1908 and

1913, and no record exists of important productions for the two following years.

For the entire period of silent cinema, Norway boasted no studio to speak of, and thus the

affirmation of a 'national style' particular to it derived in large part from the exploitation

of the Nordic landscape. The first sign of the end of a semi-amateur phase in production

came in 1920 with the appearance of two films: Kaksen på Øverland ('The braggarts of

Overland'), directed by G. A. Olsen, and Fante-Anne ('The lady-tramp'), acted by Asta

Nielsen and directed by Rasmus Breistein. The following year saw the first important

adaptation of a work by Knut Hamsun, Markens grode ('The growth of the soil', Gunnar

Sommerfeldt, 1921), but, significantly, the film was directed by a Dane and photographed

by a Finn, George Schnéevoigt, who was resident in Denmark at the time and who had

been the cameraman for Carl Theodor Dreyer's Pränkästan ( The Parson's Widow, 1920),

filmed in Norway for Svenska Biografteater. Another film -- Pan ( Harald Schwenzen,

1922), produced by the newly formed Kommunernes Films-Central -- was also taken

from a work by Hamsun.

After an interval of a year, the first film to be considered at the time as worthy of an

international audience appeared: Till Süters ('In the mountains', 1924), the first film

directed by the journalist Harry Ivarson. Den nye lensmanden ('The new commissar', Leif

Sinding, 1926), produced by a new company, Svalefilm, achieved equal acclaim. The

brief flourishing of Norwegian silent cinema reached its peak with Troll-elgen ('The

magic leap', Walter Fürst, 1927), a grandiose natural fresco whose worth is in part due to

the photography of the Swede Ragnar Westfelt, and with Laila ( 1929), dedicated to the

Lapps in the north of the country. Even here however, it is worth noting the foreign input,

from the Finno-Danish director Schnéevoigt to the acting of the Swedish Mona

Mårtenson and the Danish Peter Malberg.

The somewhat limited extent of Norwegian silent cinema is today represented by about

thirty titles available at the Norsk Filminstitutt, Oslo.

DENMARK

On 17 September 1904 Constantin Philipsen opened the first permanent film exhibition

hall in Copenhagen. Danish fiction film production had already got under way a year

earlier when the photographer to the royal family, Peter Elfelt, had made Henrettelsen

('The execution'), which still survives today. In 1906 an exhibitor, Ole Olsen, set up the

Nordisk Film Kompagni, which was to play a fundamental role in Danish cinema

throughout the silent period, and indeed in international cinema for a good part of the

1910s. By 1910, Nordisk was considered the world's second largest production company

after Pathé; its first studio, built by the company in 1906, is the oldest surviving film

studio in the world. Most of the fiction films of the early period were directed by exstaff

sergeant Viggo Larsen, and shot by Axel Sorensen (renamed Axel Graatkjæer after 1911).

Of the 248 fiction films produced between 1903 and 1910, 242 were made by Nordisk.

Only after 1909 did other companies extend the panorama of Danish cinema: Biorama of

Copenhagen and Fotorama of Aarhus, both founded in 1909; and Kinografen in 1910.

In 1910 a Fotorama film called Den hvide slavehandel ('The white slave trade') marked a

turning-point in the evolution of fiction films not only in Scandinavia but throughout the

world. The film dealt with the theme of prostitution in previously unheard of explicit

terms, and thereby inaugurated a new genre-the 'sensational' film, set in the world of

crime, vice, or the circus. On the basis of the success of the Éclair film Nick Carter, le roi

des détectives ('Nick Carter, King of the detectives', Victorin Jasset, 1908), Nordisk began

a series in 1910 whose protagonist was a brilliant criminal, Dr Gar el Hama: Eduard

SchnedlerSørensen directed both Dødsflugten (UK title: The Flight from Death; US title:

The Nihilist Conspiracy, 1911) and Dr. Gar el Hama II / Dr. Gar el Hama Flugt (Dr. Gar el

Hama: Sequel to A Dead Man's Child, 1912), and to some extent these films inspired the

most famous films of criminal exploits, made in France by Jasset ( Zigomar, 1911) and

later by Louis Feuillade ( Fantõmas, 1913).

One important consequence of the move towards 'sensational' drama was the development

of new techniques in lighting, in camera-positioning and in set design. The case of Den

sorte drøm ('The black dream'), by Urban Gad (Fotorama, 1911), is particularly

noteworthy in this regard. For the high anxiety of the most intense scenes, the reflectors

were taken down from their usual stands and laid on the ground, so that the actors threw

long, dark shadows on to the walls. The use of a hand-held lantern, clutched by the

protagonists as they struggled forward in the dark, was deployed to great effect after

1914, in Gar el Hama III: Slangøn (The Abduction, or Dr. Gar el Hama's Escape From

Prison, 1914) by Robert Dinesen, and in Verdens undergang (The Flaming Sword, or The

End of the World, 1916) by August Blom. A variant on this effect was to have a character

enter a dark room and turn on the light. The shooting was suspended and the actor

blocked as the lamp in shot was about to be turned on; the scene was then lit as if by the

lamp in question and shooting recommenced. Often the two segments of the shot were

tinted in different colours, usually in blue for darkness and ochre for light. Another

powerful effect, hardly seen outside Denmark before 1911, was the silhouette outline,

shot from an interior with the lens pointing towards an open or half-open door, or a

window. These ideas, which characterize two films directed by August Blom for Nordisk

-- Ungdommens ret (The Right of Youth, 1911) and Exspeditricen (In the Prime of Life,

1911) -- are taken to an extreme in Det hemmelighedsfulde X (Sealed Orders or Orders

under Seal, 1913), the first film by the greatest Danish director of the silent period besides

Carl Theodor Dreyer, Benjamin Christensen ( 1879-1959). Christensen developed

techniques and figures already used by the French director Léonce Perret in L'Enfant de

Paris ('The child of Paris'), and Le Roman d'un mousse ('A midshipman's tale', Gaumont,

1913), and arrived at extraordinary results using silhouettes and half-lit images. His

aggressive experimentalism reached its peak in the thriller Hævnens nat (Blind Justice,

1915).

Another frequent trick was to show a character who was out of range of the camera's field

in a mirror: for example, in Ved fængslets port (Temptations of a Great City, 1911) by

August Blom -- starring the most famous male lead actor of the time, Valdemar Psilander-

and in for åbent Tæppe / Desdemona ( 1911). In all probability, the mirror was used as an

expedient to avoid the need for montages of several shots in a scene (since Danish

directors seem not to have been keen on elaborate editing techniques), but nevertheless,

its allusive and symbolic impact enriched the treatment of sexuality in films such as the

frank and open Afgrunden by Urban Gad ( The Abyss, Kosmorama, 1910), which saw the

début of the greatest actress of Danish silent film, Asta Nielsen.

Early Danish film-makers paid relatively little attention to the narrative dynamic of their

films: before 1914 tracking shots, flashbacks, and close-ups were very rarely used. They

thus fell well short of the fluidity and naturalism typical of American cinema of the same

period. However, the Danes had a profound and lasting influence on film production on

an international scale. On a general level, their most significant contribution was in the

development away from short-length narrative films to films of three, four, or even more

reels -- August Blom's Atlantis (Nordisk, 1913), with a huge budget, ran to 2,280 metres

of film, excluding intertitles -- and in the cultural legitimization of cinema, which was

encouraged by the appearance of established actors and actresses from classical theatre.

On a more specific level, Danish cinema had an enor mous impact on its neighbours. The

first works by the Swedish directors Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström, along with

almost all Swedish films before 1916, bear the technical imprint of Denmark, and only in

the following two years was an autonomous identity developed in Sweden. Danish films

were also widely distributed in prerevolutionary Russia, leading some companies to shoot

alternative endings designed to satisfy the Russian taste for tragic denouements. Films

shot in Russia in the earlier 1910s, and especially the first dramas by Yevgeny Bauer from

1913, display techniques of lighting (back- and multiple-lighting) and framing (doors and

windows shot from within) which clearly derive from methods current in Danish cinema.

The most lucrative foreign market for Nordisk was Germany -- at least until 1917, when

the German government took control of the national film industry. Profits were so high

that the company could invest in a huge chain of cinemas. The close relationship between

Danish and German cinema in the 1910s and 1920s becomes apparent if one compares

the 'sensational' themes (criminal geniuses, white slave trade, extreme passions) and the

markedly expressionist camera techniques (oblique shots, half-light effects) of pre-1914

Danish dramas with the work of German directors such as Joe May, Otto Rippert, and

early Fritz Lang. Vilhelm Glückstadt, whose extraordinary work as a director has

remained almost unexplored to this day, was the author of three films which reveal

profound affinities with the expressionist aesthetic: Den fremmede ('The benefactor',

1914); Det gamle spil om enhver / Enhver ('Anyone', 1915), a complex tangle of

flashbacks, parallel story-lines, and strongly metaphorical imagery; and the impassioned

Kornspekulanten ('The wheat speculators', 1916), whose attribution to Glückstadt is not

entirely certain, but which looks forwards to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr ( 1932).

Karin Molander as the reporter in Mauritz Stiller's brilliant comedy Kärlek och

journalistik ('Love and journalism', 1916)

Dreyer is a towering figure in the pantheon of Danish cinema. His work represents the

most complete synthesis of its expressionist tendencies with its meticulous figurative

sobriety. His interest in psychology and in the conflicts between the unconscious and the

rational elements in human actions was already apparent in his first film Præsidenten (The

President, 1919), and in the episode film Blade af Satans bog (Leaves from Satan's book,

1921), and reached a new level of excellence in Du skal ære din hustru (The Master of the

House), produced in 1925 by a new, fierce competitor of Nordisk, Palladium, run by Lau

Lauritzen. Danish cinema went into gradual decline after the First World War, and Dreyer

remained an isolated figure of genius in his home country. He was driven to continue his

career abroad, in Norway, Sweden, Germany, and France. Danish cinema responded to its

inexorable loss of influence by turning in on itself. In the early 1920s, in a lastditch effort

to stop the rot, Nordisk offered huge sums of money to the director Anders Wilhelm

Sandberg to adapt a number of Dickens's novels, but the genuine success of the results in

Denmark struggled to transfer abroad. A similar fate awaited the first Danish animation

film, De tre smaa mænd ('Three little men', Robert Storm-Petersen and Carl Wieghorst,

1920), and experiments in sound cinema carried out by Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen

after 1922. The only significant exception to the rule was the series of comedies

'Fyrtaanet og Bivognen' ('Long and short'), produced between 1921 and 1927 by Carl

Schenstrom and Harald Madsen. Klovnen ('Clowns', Anders Wilhelm Sandberg, 1926)

was the last great drama film made by Nordisk to be distributed in America, but its

success was not sufficient to prevent the virtually total eclipse of Denmark in the arena of

the great producing nations.

Around 2,700 fiction and non-fiction titles were produced in Denmark between 1896 and

1930. Most of the films of which copies have survived (including about 400 fiction films)

are to be found at Det Danske Filmmuseum in Copenhagen.

SWEDEN

The first entrepreneur to dedicate himself full-time to cinema in Sweden was Numa

Peterson, a photographer who had begun his activity by showing Lumière films. In 1897 a

Lumière agent, Georges Promio, taught an employee of Petersen's, Ernest Florman, how

to film events live and how to stage short comic episodes. However, foreign companies

remained the dominant force in the Swedish market until 1908, when an accountant who

was also an amateur photographer, Charles Magnusson, was offered the chance to join

Svenska Biografteatern, a company which had been formed at Kristianstad in February of

the year before. He had some success with a series of films synchronized with

gramophone recordings, and then moved on to dedicate his energies to productions which

reflected the themes and personalities of Swedish theatre. He was assisted in his task by

Gustaf 'Munk' Linden, the author of an ambitious and popular version of the historical

drama Regina von Emmeritz and King Gustaf II Adolf ( 1910), and by the first female

director in scandinavia, Anna Hofman-Uddgren, who was given per mission by August

Strindberg to adapt his plays Miss Julie and The Father for the screen. Both appeared in

1912. The modest success of these films and the growing competition from Denmark

induced the owners to transfer production to Stockholm, where a larger studio set could

be built and where the chain of cinemas throughout Sweden could be better co-ordinated.

Magnusson demanded and was given absolute control over the move. He planned the new

studios at Lidingö, near Kyrkviken, and acquired the support of a group of artists and

technicians who were to define the course of silent cinema in Sweden: Julius Jaenzon,

appointed chief cameraman and director of the studios at Lidingé; Georg af Klercker,

head of production and director; Victor Sjöström, 'the best director on the market today'

according to the magazine Scenisk Konst, 6-7 April 1912; and Mauritz Stiller, a Russian-

Jewish theatre actor and director whose uneven stage career had led him back and forth

between Sweden and Finland for many years. Magnusson himself directed a number of

films between 1909 and 1912, but he soon settled into a role as producer-patron, offering

his formidable intuition and energy in support of the most risky ideas put to him by his

directors, but also ensuring the collaboration of high-calibre intellectuals, such as Selma

Lagerlöf, whose novels were filmed by Stiller and Sjöström. In 1919 a new young

financier, Ivan Kreuger, appeared on the scene and engineered the merger of Magnusson's

company with its rival Film Scandia A/S to form a new company, Svenska Filmindustri.

New studios were built, new cinemas were opened, and old ones restored. By 1920

Svenska Filmindustri had become a world power, with subsidiaries across the globe. The

'golden age' of Swedish cinema, stretching from 1916 to 1921, was in part due to

Sweden's neutrality in the Great War. At a time when almost all the other great film

industries in Europe (including that of Denmark) were threatened by embargoes and

serious financial difficulties, Sweden continued to export films without hindrance, and, by

the same token, took full advantage of the drastic reduction in imports. However, even

these favourable conditions would have had little impact were it not for the creative

contribution of a number of exceptionally talented directors.

The first in chronological order -- before Stiller and Sjöström joined Svenska

Biografteatern -- was Georg af Klercker, whose films are characterized by an extreme

figurative precision, a meticulous attention to acting, and by a restrained and rigorous

reinterpretation of the canons of bourgeois drama, social realism, and the 'circus' genre,

initiated in Denmark by Robert Dinesen and Alfred Lind with the seminal De fire djævle

('The four devils', Kinografen, 1911) and characterized by sentimental plots, spectacular

clashes, and vendettas amongst riders and acrobats. After Dödsritten under cirkuskupolen

(The Last Performance, 1912), the company's first international success, Klercker moved

briefly to Denmark. He returned to Sweden on the invitation of a new company, F. V.

Hasselblad Fotografiska AB of Göteborg, for whom he directed twenty-eight films

between 1915 and 1917. One of the best was Förstadtprästen ('The suburban vicar', 1917),

the story of a priest working to help society's rejects, filmed on location in the poor

districts of Göteborg.

Mauritz Stiller ( 1883-1928) specialized in comedies with a carefully controlled pace and

a subtle vein of social satire which verged on the burlesque, in which the construction and

articulation of events took precedence over psychological analysis and description. Two

typical examples of his style are provided by Den moderna suffragetten ('The modern

suffragette', 1913) and Kärlek och journalistik ('Love and journalism', 1916). He moved

on with Thomas Graals bösta film (Wanted: A Film Actress, 1917) and Thomas Graals

bästa barn (Marriage à la mode, 1918) to a set of 'moral tales' marked by a disillusioned

perspective on the precarious nature of relations between the sexes and on the inconstancy

of passion. This tendency in Stiller's work reached a peak of cynicism and disrespect in

Erotikon (Just like a Man; also known as After We are Married or Bonds that Cheat,

1920), but is offset at the turn of the decade by his growing penchant for treatments of

themes such as ambition and guilt. Herr Arnes pengar (UK title: Snows of Destiny; US

title Sir Arne's Treasure, 1919) and Gösta Berlings saga (UK title: The Atonement of

Gösta Berling; US title: The Legend of Gösta Berling, 1923), both taken from novels by

Selma Lagerlöf, elaborate such themes with a figurative intensity and epic energy which

no director in Europe had thus far achieved. Gösta Berlings saga also introduced a

talented young actress, Greta Garbo, whose inseparable companion and mentor Stiller

was to become. Invited to Hollywood by Louis B. Mayer, Stiller insisted on bringing

Garbo with him; but whereas their departure from Sweden was the first step in her

meteoric rise to stardom, for Stiller it coincided with a creative crisis from which he never

recovered.

With the departure to America of Sjöström ( 1923), Stiller and Garbo ( 1925), the actor

Lars Hanson, and the Danish director Benjamin Christensen who had made his most

ambitious film in Sweden, the perturbing documentary drama Häxan (Witchcraft through

the Ages, 1921), Swedish cinema entered a phase of steep decline. Instead of deciding on

a renewal of the themes and styles which had brought them such glory, directors of not

negligible talent such as Gustaf Molander, John W. Brunius, and Gustaf Edgren were

forced to ape their conventions in a wan attempt to adapt characteristics of their national

cinema to the genres and narrative models of 1920s Hollywood. 'We can now say', wrote

Ture Dahlin in 1931 in L'Art cinématographique, 'that the great silent cinema of Sweden

is dead, dead and buried. . . . It would take a genius to resurrect it from its present, routine

state.'

The fiction films made in Sweden in the silent period are estimated to have been about

500 (including shorts synchronized with phonograph recordings). About 200 are at

present preserved at the Svenska Filminstitutet in Stockholm.

Bibliography

Engberg, Marguerite ( 1977). Dansk stumfilm.

Film in Norway ( 1979).

Forslund, Bengt ( 1988), Victor Sjoström: His Life and his Work.

Schiave bianche allo specchio: le otigini del cinema in Scandinavia (1896 1918), ( 1986).

Uusitalo, Kari ( 1975), 'Finnish Film Production (1904-1918)'.

Werner, Gösta ( 1970), Den svenska filmens historia.

Victor Sjöström (1879-1960)

Tösen från Stormyrtorpet (The Girl from Stormy Croft, 1917).

In 1880 Sjöström's parents-a lumber merchant and a former actress - emigrated from

Sweden to the United States, taking their seven-month-old baby Victor with them. But the

mother soon died, and the son, to escape an unwelcome stepmother and an increasingly

authoritarian father, returned to Sweden, where he was brought up by his uncle Victor, an

actor at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Fired by enthusiasm for the stage, the

young Victor also became an actor, and at the age of 20 was already renowned for his

sensitive performances and powerful stage presence.

In 1911 Charles Magnusson was busily reorganizing the Svenska Biografteatern film

studio, where he was head of production, aiming to give cinema more cultural legitimacy

by bringing in leading technical and artistic personnel from the best theatre companies in

Sweden. He hired the brilliant cameraman Julius Jaenzon (later to be responsible, for the

distinctive, look of many of Sjöström's most famous Swedish films), then in 1912 Mauritz

Stiller and, shortly afterwards, Victor Sjöström. Sjöström was by then running his own

theatre company in Malmö, but he eagerly accepted Magnusson's offer, driven (he wrote

later) 'by a youthful desire for adventure and a curiosity to try this new medium of which

then I did not have the slightest knowledge.'

After acting in a couple of films directed by Stiller, Sjöström turned to direction, making

his mark with the crisp realism applied to the controversial social drama

Ingeborg Holm ( 1913). But it was with Terje Vigen in 1917 that his creativity came into

full flower. The film shows a profound feeling for the Swedish landscape of his maternal

origins and achieves an intimate correspondence between natural events and the inner and

interpersonal conflicts of the characters. This symbiosis of inner and outer is even more

prominent in Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru ( The Outlaw and his Wife, 1918), the tragedy

of a couple seeking refuge - but finding death - in the mountains, in a vain attempt to

escape an unjust and oppressive society. 'Human love', said Sjöström, 'is the only answer

to fling in the face of a cruel nature.'

Partly out of her admiration fo Sjöström's films, the novelist Selma Lagerlöf had granted

all her film rights to Svenska Bio. Sjöström found in her work the ideal expression of the

active role played by nature in the destiny of characters torn between good and evil. In his

adaptation of The Sons off Ingmar (Ingmarssönerna, 1919) this vision finds expression in

a family saga of monumental scope. But it is at its most intense in The Phantom Carriage

(Körkarlen, 1921), a drama of the supernatural with a complex structure of interlaced

flashbacks, set on a New Year's Eve dominated by remorse and a desperated search for

redemption.

Swedish cinema had profited from the country's neutrality during the First World War to

make an impact on the European market and to challenge American supremacy. But after

the war it lost its precarious privileged position. With the industry in crisis, both Stiller

and Sjöström accepted offers to go to Hollywood. Sjöström arrived there in 1923, with a

contract from Goldwyn and his name changed to Seastrom. After some of the Lon Chaney

character - a scientist who decides to become a clown after a false friend has gone off not

only with his wife but with his most important research discovery.Triumphant in

Hollywood, Sjöström made The Divine Woman ( 1928) with his even more famous

compatriot, Greta Garbo. But more important and characteristic were two films with

Lillian Gish, The Scarlet Letter ( 1927) and The Wind (released in 1928). The former is a

free adaptation of Hawthorne's novel in which he was able to develop the theme of

intolerance and social isolation explored in Berg-Ejvind. Then, in The Wind he achieved

the ultimate tragic fusion of the violence of the elements and of human passions in a story

set in an isolated cabin in the midst of a windswept desert.A high point of the silent

aesthetic, The Wind was distributed in a synchronized version, allegedly with the ending

changed. Shortly after its release, Sjöström returned to Sweden. Although, in a letter to

Lillian Gish, he later referred to his time in the United States as 'perhaps the happiest days

of my life', it is possible that he felt apprehensive about his future role in Hollywood after

the coming of sound. After making one more film in Sweden and one in England, he went

back to his former career as an actor and in the 1940s became 'artistic adviser' to Svensk

Filmindustri. He acted in nineteen films - by Gustaf Molander, Arne Mattsson, and (most

notably) Ingmar Bergman, his protégés at Svensk Filmindustri; his final role was in

Bergman's Wild Strawberries ( 1957), a film which can be seen as a moving

autobiographical reflection of Sjöström's ideas on dreams and on the failings of mankind,

and an expression of his wonderment in face of the role of nature in shaping human

feeling.PAOLO CHERCHI USAISELECT FILMOGRAPHY Trädgårdsmästeren (The

Gardener) ( 1912); Ingeborg Holm ( 1913); Judaspengar (Judas Money / Traitor's

Reward) ( 1915); Terje Vigen (A Man there Was) ( 1917); Tösen från Stormyrtorpet (The

Girl from Stormy Croft / The Woman He Chose) ( 1917); Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru

(The Outlaw and his Wife) ( 1918); Ingmarssönerna I-II (The Sons of Ingmar) ( 1919);

Klostret I Sendomir (The Monastery of Sendomir / The Secret of the Monastery) ( 1920);

Mästerman (Master Samuel) ( 1920); Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage / The Stroke of

Midnight) ( 1921); Name the Man ( 1924); He Who Gets Slapped ( 1924); The Scarlet

Letter ( 1927); The Divine Woman ( 1928); The Wind ( 1928); A Lady to Love / Die

Sehnsucht jeder Frau ( 1930); Markurells i Wadköping (The Markurells of Wadköping)

( 1931); Under the Red Robe ( 1937)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Forslund, Bengt ( 1980), Victor Sjöström: His Life and Work.

Jeanne. René and Ford, Charles ( 1963), Victor jöström.

Roud, Richard (ed.) ( 1980), Cinema: A Critical Dictionary: Pense, Hans ( 1969),

Seastrom and Stiller in Hollywood.

Pre-Revolutionary Russia

YURI TSIVIAN

Original as it may seem in style and subject-matter, film production in Russia started as

an offshoot of international trade. Because neither cameras nor film stock were

manufactured in Russia in the 1910s, Russian production companies developed in a very

different way from the major film companies in the west. Rather than being a corollary of

the equipment industry, national filmmaking in Russia was actuated by importers (in the

first place), distributors, and (in rare cases) theatre owners.

With the notable exception of the ex-photographer Alexander Drankov, the importer was

the key to the first production companies in Russia. The importer was a gobetween

linking foreign film producers and local exhibitors; the more companies an importer was

able to enlist, the more chances he had to launch his own production. Alexander

Khanzhonkov's production company started as a small commission agency selling films

and projection equipment manufactured by Théophile Pathé, Urban, Hepworth, Bioscope,

and Itala Film. Companies like Gaumont (until 1909), Warwick, Ambrosio, Nordisk, and

Vitagraph were represented by Pavel Thiemann, another powerful figure in the pre-

revolutionary film industry. Because it took a lot of travelling between Russia and the

exporting countries, the share of early American films on the Russian market was

relatively small. Pathé-Frères preferred to send their own representatives engaged in

equipment sales (from 1904), laboratory services, or production ( 1908-13). Gaumont

followed Pathé's example, but on a more modest scale.

Around 1906-7, film theatres in Moscow and St Petersburg started renting used prints to

the provinces, and the system of importers purchasing films from production companies

to resell to exhibitors began to be replaced. Specialized distribution agencies in Moscow

supplied prints to the city's theatres and regional agencies. Each regional agency

controlled several provinces, known as their 'distribution district' (prokatnyi rayon),

renting prints to local cinemas.

Incidentally or otherwise, the first home-produced films appeared when the distribution

system was fully established on the Russian film market. Combining production with

distribution in this way was the only hope of success for a film-producing company in

Russia in the 1910s. A vertically semi-integrated system allowed Russian studios to invest

the money they earned from distributing foreign films into native productions-a system

that would be used, with variable success, by the stock-holding company Sovkino in the

mid-1920s.

STRATEGIES

Two types of strategy -- disruptive and competitive -- were employed by studios

competing for the Russian market. Disruption (sryv), was a notorious gimmick whereby a

competitor's production was undermined by a cheaper (and sloppier) version of the same

subject (story, title) released earlier or on the same day. Borrowed from the theatre

entrepreneur F. Korsh (who used the method to rob competitors' first productions of their

novelty value), disruption was systematically employed in the film industry by financially

insecure companies like Drankov or Perski in order to tempt regional renting agencies

with a low-price alternative to Khanzhonkov's or Pathé's hits. This policy achieved little

beyond hectic production races and a pervasive atmosphere of paranoid secrecy. Distinct

from disruption, a strategy of competition (developed by studios with solid financial

backing: first Khanzhonkov, Pathé-Frères, Thiemann, and Reinhardt, later Yermoliev and

Kharitonov) consisted of promoting the idea of 'quality pictures' and turning a

recognizable studio style into a marketable value.

STYLE

In terms of style, Russian pre-revolutionary film-making falls into two periods, before

and after 1913. From 1908 and the first Russian-made movie (Drankov's Stenka Razin)

until 1913, the two main competitors were Khanzhonkov & Co. and Pathé-Frères.

However, in 1913 all foreign production in Russia was curtailed, and the exiting PathÉ

lent support to the rising studios of Thiemann & Reinhardt and Yermoliev. Promptly

followed by Khanzhonkov, they began redefining old standards of quality by creating

(and selling) films in the so-called 'Russian style'.

From its very beginning, early Russian film-making was marked by dependence on non-

cinematic culture. This can be explained partly by the belated start of Russian production.

Because the first Russian film, Stenka Razin, was made in the same year as L'Assassinat

du Duc de Guise ('The assassination of the Duc de Guise'), Russian film skipped the

entire period of tricks and chases which formed the basis of all other key national

cinemas, and started by trying to match the success of the film d'art.

Aside from forays into the sensationalist Grand Guignol style internationally practised in

European cinema in 1908-10 (and up to 1913 in Russia), film d'art style exercised

complete sway over the first period of Russian filmmaking. This tendency coincided with

(and was maintained by) the foreign policy of PathÉ-Frères, which, as Richard Abel has

suggested, was to produce culturally specific art pictures, mainly historical costume

dLmas and ethnographic pictures from peasant life. Because the Moscow production

department of Pathé was primarily concerned with the international market, the cultural

specificity of their films usually boiled down to touches of local colour: reportedly, no

one was able to talk the Pathé director Kai Hansen out of having a de rigueur samovar in

every frame, even in a film set in the sixteenth century, or having actors taking low

'boyard bows' instead of hat tipping in modern dramas. Khanzhonkov on the other hand

aimed its product at the domestic market, boasting cultural and ethnic authenticity in the

form of screen versions of Russian classical literature, directed by the studio's leading

director Pyotr Chardynin. The literary orientation of Khanzhonkov's style was the trump

card in their game against Pathé, to which the latter responded with live tableaux staged

after famous Russian paintings.

From 1911 the influence of the film d'art style on Russian film-making began to wane.

With Pathé and Gaumont production removed from the Russian scene, Russian

filmmaking found itself under the influence of the Danish and Italian salon melodrama.

The scene of action shifted from past to present and from the countryside to the city;

serious costume drama gave way to sophisticated melodrama with a decadent flavour. The

shift was epitomized by Vladimir Gardin's and Yakov Protazanov's 5,000-metre-long

(about three hours) hit The Keys to Happiness ( 1913), which pushed into prominence

Thiemann & Reinhardt, a studio hitherto overshadowed by Khanzhonkov and Pathé-

Frères. This film introduced a characteristic pause-pause-pause manner of acting (initially

called 'the braking school', later known simply as 'Russian style'), originally conceived as

a cinematic counterpart to Stanislavsky's method used on stage. This acting technique

soon evolved into a specific melancholy mood that is particularly pervasive in Yevgeny

Bauer's films shot for the Khanzhonkov Company.

The First World War, which closed so many borders to film imports, was the golden age

of the Russian film industry. Never before or since have Russian productions so

dominated the Russian film market. During 1914-16 an introverted, slow manner was

consciously cultivated. by Russian directors and formulated by the trade press as a

national aesthetic credo. The style was crystallized at Yermoliev's studio, which

developed typical characters -the femme fatale, the victimized woman, the neurotic man

-- and a typical mise-en-scène -- the motionless tableau with each character deep in

thought. The tableau image became more important than the development of the plot.

'Psychological' mannerisms and slow action became obsolete in the radical change

Russian film-making style was to undergo after 1917. In tune with the more general

process of cultural reorientation taking place in Soviet Russia, the notion of a well-made

plot (syuzhet) and rapid narrative became important in literature and film. The age of Lev

Kuleshov with his accelerated editing and obsessive action was heralded by Engineer

Prait's Project ( 1918) -- a film reflecting not so much changes in Russian society as

filmmakers' reaction to the past decade of film production.

PERSONALITIES

The best years of private production in Russia ( 1914-19) were marked by the increasing

role of film fandom. Initially promoted as local counterparts of foreign stars ('our

Psilander' Vladimir Maximov, or Vera Kholodnaya as 'Bertini of the North'), Russian

names were soon found to be winning over the public. This led to fresh strategies in

studio competition: some new studios emerged (like Kharitonov's) built entirely around

enticing stars with established reputations. Alongside the trade journals, fan magazines

started to appear. One titled Pegas, financed by Khanzhonkov and shaped like the 'thick'

literary magazines, regularly offered aesthetic discussions of cinema as art and the

contribution of individual film-makers. Thus the concept of a 'film director' with his or

her individual career was formed. Pyotr Chardynin had the reputation of an 'actor's

director'; after quitting Khanzhonkov's company for Kharitonov's in 1916 (with several

major actors joining him), Chardynin directed an all-star boxoffice hit The Tale of my

Dearest Love ( 1918), which saw a number of successful rereleases well into the Soviet

era. Yakov Protazanov was acclaimed for The Queen of Spades ( 1916), whose elaborate

costumes and set design imitated Alexander Benois's drawings; his reputation as 'high art

director' was confirmed by the success of Father Sergius ( 1918). Though less known

among the general public, the 'wizard' of animated insects Ladislas Starewitch was the

film-maker most in demand by the studios. However, among Russian directors he was the

only one who managed to preserve partial independence; he had a small studio of his own

and a free hand in his choice of subjects. In the eyes of their Soviet successors their pre-

revolutionary reputations turned directors into 'bourgeois specialists' (spetsy). With the

notable exception of the protean Protazanov, not one of them was able to make a

comparable career in the new Russia.

Bibliography

Ginzburg, Semion ( 1963), Kinematografiya dorevolyutsionnoy Rossii ('The cinema of

pre-revolutionary Russia').

Hansen, Miriam ( 1992), "Deadly Scenarios: Narrative Perspective and Sexual Politics in

Pre-revolutionary Russian Film".

Leyda, Jay ( 1960), Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film.

Likhachev, Boris ( 1926), Kino v Rossii.

Cherchi Paolo Usai, Codelli, Lorenzo, Montanaro, Carlo, and Rob David inson (eds.)

( 1989), Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 19081919.

Tsivian, Yuri ( 1989), "Some Preparatory Remarks on Russian Cinema".

Yevgeny Bauer (1867-1917)

Singed Wings ( 1915)

Regarded in Russia in the 1910s as his country's most important film-maker, only to be

condemned as a 'decadent' by official Soviet histories, Yevgeny Frantsevich Bauer was

internationally rediscovered in 1989 as a major director. His work was informed by Art

Nouveau aesthetics and a Symbolist sensibility characteristic of the silver age of Russian

culture as a whole.

Born on 20 January 1867, into the family of a wellknown Austrian zither-player and his

Russian wife, Bauer kept Austrian citizenship, but was baptized into the Orthodox

religion.

Yevgeny Bauer attended (but never graduated from) the Moscow College of Painting,

Sculpture, and Architecture, and becam known as a set designer for operetta and farcical

comedies at Charles Aumont's winter garden Aquarium in Moscow, Mikhail Lentovsky's

vaudeville theatre, Hermitage, and the Theatre of Miniatures, Zon. During this time, he

also occasionally performed as an amateur actor. In 1912 he was hired as a contract set

designer for the Pathé Freres Moscow Department assisted by the future leading Soviet

set designer Alexei Utkin. In 1913 he designed sets for Drankov and Taldykin's super-

production The Tercentenary of the Rule of the House of Romanov, and later the same

year began his career as a director at Pathé's and Drankov and Taldykin's studios.

Bauer's unique directorial achievements were singled out as early as 1913, as being above

praise in their artistic taste and intuition - something rarely found in cinema. When Bauer

joined the Khanzhonkov company in January 1914, his fame was boosted by the

company's trade press; however, despite attempts to rank him among the biggest names of

contemporary theatre, Bauer's name remained largely unknown outside the circles of film

fans and film-makers.

Of the eighty-two films firmly accredited to Bauer, twenty-six remain - enough to

evaluate his original style in terms of set design, lighting, editing, and camera movement.

Referring to the unusually spacious interiors in Bauer's films, contemporaries noted their

affinity with Art Nouveau interior architecture associated in Russia with the name of

Fedor Shekhtel. Bauer's genius as a set designer reached its apex in 1916 in an ambitious

high-budget production A Life for a Life with lavish interiors filmed in very long shots

with overhead space sometimes twice the height of the characters. As a reviewer

remarked about these sets (designed in collaboration with Utkin), 'Bauer's school does not

recognize realism on the screen; but even if no one would live in such rooms . . . this still

produces an effect, a feeling, which is far better than the efforts of others who claim to be

directors.'

When in 1916 the craze for close-ups hit Russian filmmaking, many directors opposed it

on the grounds that the actors' faces covered the background space and thus diminished

the artistic effect of the settings. Although Bauer was excited by the narrative possibilities

provided by the close-up, it was not a simple change to make for a director whose

reputation (and, indeed, whose genius) was based on extraordinary set design.However,

despite Bauer's fame as a set designer, his achievements as a director were not limited to

this area. As early as 1913 his tracking shots display a sympathy towards the 'inner life' of

the characters rather than merely stressing the vastness of the décor. In marked contrast to

the Italian style (as evidenced for example in Pastrone's 1914Cabiria) in which the camera

scans the scene's space laterally without entering into it, Bauer's camera darts in and out,

mediating beteen the viewer and the actor.Bauer's interest in original lighting effects was

further encouraged in 1914 by analogous Danish and American experiments. This is how

the actor Iran Perestiani remembered Bauer's work with light: 'His scenery was alive,

mixing the monumental with the intimate. Next to a massive and heavy column - a

transparent web of tulle sheeting; the light plays over a brocade coverlet under the dark

arches of a low flat, over flowers, furs, crystal. A beam of light in his hands was an artist's

brush.'Bauer died of stagnant pneumonia on 9 June 1917, in a hospital in Crimea. There is

no way to tell what he would have achieved had he lived into the 1920s. Many of his

associates made impressive careers in the Soviet cinema: Bauer's permanent cameraman

Boris Zavelev shot Alexander Dovzhenko's Zvenigora ( 1927); Vasily Rakhal designed

sets for Sergei Eisenstein and Abram Room, and Bauer's youngest disciple Lev Kuleshov

was declared the founding father of the montage school.YURI TSIVIANSELECT

FILMOGRAPHY The Twilight of a Woman's Soul ( 1913); Child of the Big City / The

Girl from the Streets ( 1914); Silent Witnesses ( 1914); Daydreams / Deceived Dreams

( 1915); After Death / Motifs from Turgenev ( 1915); One Thousand and Second Ruse

( 1915); A Life for a Life / A Tear for Every Drop of Blood ( 1916); Dying Swan ( 1916);

Nelly Raintseva ( 1916); After Happiness ( 1917); The King of Paris ( 1917); The

Revolutionary ( 1917).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robinson, David ( 1990), 'Evgenii Bauer and the Cinema of Nikolai II', Sight and Sound,

Winter 1990.

Tsivian, Yuri ( 1989), "Evgenii Frantsevich Bauer".

The Soviet Union and the Russian émigrés

NATALIA NUSSINOVA

CINEMA AND THE REVOLUTION

The Soviet cinema was officially born on 27 August 1919, when Lenin signed the Council

of People's Commissars of the RSFSR Decree 'On the transfer of the photographic trade

and industry to Narkompros [The People's Commissariat of Education]', nationalizing

private film and photographic enterprises. But the struggle for power in film had already

begun in 1917, when film workers banded together in three professional organizations:

the OKO (a federation of distributors, exhibitors, and producers); the Union of Workers in

Cinematographic Art (creative workers -- the 'film aristocracy'); and the Union of

FilmTheatre Workers (the grass roots or proletariat, largely projectionists). The last of

these, asserting workers' control over cinemas and film enterprises, soon came to

determine the line taken by the Moscow and Petrograd Cinema Committees, which had

been set up in 1918 and had already begun nationalizing parts of the film industry. By the

end of 1918 the Petrograd Committee had nationalized sixty-four non-functioning

cinemas and two film studios abandoned by their previous owners, while in Moscow,

where most film enterprises were concentrated, a process of nationalization was carried

out between November 1918. and January 1920.

In this early phase only large companies were subject to nationalization, and the biggest

film studio (that of the Khanzhonkov Company) had no more than 100 people on its staff,

so during the first years of Soviet cinema private and state film companies coexisted.

Certain pre-revolutionary film companies (Drankov, Perski, Vengerov, and Khimera) went

out of business even before nationalization. The basis of Soviet film production was

therefore laid by half a dozen film enterprises, which after nationalization came under the

Photography and Film section of Narkompros. These were the former Khanzhonkov

studio (which became First Enterprise 'Goskino'), the Skobolev Committee (Second

Enterprise), Yermoliev (Third Enterprise), Rus (Fourth Enterprise), Taldykin's 'Era' (Fifth

Enterprise), and Kharitonov (Sixth Enterprise). New studios also began to be constructed,

of which the first was Sevzapkino in Petrograd (later Leningrad).

The process of restructuring continued throughout the 1920s. The former Khanzhonkov

and Yermoliev studios were merged in 1924, then in 1927 construction began in the

village of Potylikha outside Moscow of new premises for this studio, which it was

decided should become the largest in the country. Construction continued until the

beginning of the 1930s and in 1935 the new combined studio became known as Mosfilm.

Meanwhile private companies subsisted. The most resilient private owners adopted a

parallel policy of merging individual studios into larger enterprises, sometimes handing

over to Soviet power in so doing an element of their financial autonomy, sometimes

acquiring it in a new form. A prime example was Moisei Aleinikov, owner of Rus film

enterprise, which had been in existence since 1915. In 1923 Rus merged with the film

bureau Mezhrabpom and formed the company known as MezhrabpomRus, which was

reorganized in 1926 as a joint-stock company. Two years later it changed the composition

of its shareholders and reorganized itself again as MezhrabpomFilm, becoming part of the

German distribution organization Prometheus and obtaining from the Council of People's

Commissars special rights to export and import films. In this guise Mezhrabpom was to

play a central role in the diffusion of Soviet film in the west.

Pressure from film workers also continued to play a role in shaping the new situation. In

1924 a group of filmmakers, led by Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov, came together in

Moscow to form the Association of Revolutionary Cinematography (ARC). The objective

of ARC (whose members came to include Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, Grigory

Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Georgi and Sergei Vasiliev, Sergei Yutkevich, Friedrich

Ermler, Esfir Shub, and many other leading film-makers) was to reinforce ideological

control over the creative process. Branches were formed in practically every studio, and

the organization had its own publications, including the weekly newspaper Kino and

(later) the magazines Sovietsky ekran and Kino i kultura. In 1929 ARC was renamed

ARRC (Association of Workers of Revolutionary Cinematography). At the end of the

decade, the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) had a strong influence

on ARRC, and a new aim was adopted of '100 per cent proletarian ideological film', as

part of the 'cultural revolution' being imposed throughout the arts.

During the 1920s regional studios came into being in the republics of the newly formed

USSR -- in the Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere. The

aim of these studios was to produce films relating to the local nationality in those areas,

and they enjoyed a certain measure of autonomy.

It was not long before the aim of concentrating and centralizing film production in order

to bring the cinema under social and state control led to the idea of establishing a single

national film industry. The first step in this direction came with the creation in December

1922 of the film enterprise Goskino, which was given a monopoly over film distribution.

In this form, Goskino turned out to be a useless bureaucracy, and it was axed at the

Twelfth Party Congress. A commission was set up to consider ways of 'uniting the film

industry on an all-Union basis' and merging all state film enterprises in each of the Union

republics in a single joint-stock society. The Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924

confirmed this direction, adding the demand for reinforced ideological monitoring in

film-making and the appointment of 'tested Communists' to senior positions in the

industry. From December 1924 this became the role of Sovkino in the Russian Federation,

while similar organizations were set up in the Union republics -- VUFKU in the Ukraine,

AFKU in Azerbaijan, Bukhkino in Central Asia, and Goskinprom in Georgia. Sovkino

and its clones had a full monopoly of distribution, import, and export of films, and

gradually took over production functions as well. Althoulgh it managed to lose a lot of

money in its early years, the Sovkino system survived to the end of the decade without

significant alteration and provided the infrastructure for the great Soviet films of the late

silent period.

THE RUSSIAN ÉMIGRÉS

With the Revolution, the Russian cinema split into two camps. One section of the industry

remained in the USSR, zealously dedicated to destroying the pre-revolutionary

experience, and creating the art of a new epoch unencumbered by the heritage of a

bygone age. Another section went into exile, endeavouring to preserve abroad the cinema

which had come into being during the prerevolutionary years.

A scene from the science fantasy Aelita ( 1924), directed by the returning émigré Yakov

Protazanov, with constructivist sets by Exter

The emigration started with a group of film-makers who in the summer of 1918 had gone

down to the Crimea to film on location. Convinced that it would be impossible to 'sit out

the Revolution' there, they embarked on a tortuous journey westward. Most found their

way to Paris, but some went to Italy, and other centres of émigré film-making activity

were Germany, Czechoslovakia, and, later in the 1920s, Hollywood.

In February 1920 Iosif Yermoliev, together with his enterprise, emigrated to Paris, where

he adopted the spelling Ermolieff and organized a studio called ErmolieffFilm. After 1922

he handed it over to producers Alexander Kamenka and Noé Bloch and it was renamed

Albatros. Among artists who worked there were directors Yakov Protazanov (who later

returned to the Soviet Union), Alexander Volkov, Vladimir Strizhevsky, and Vyacheslav

Turzhansky (or Victor Tourjansky, as he became known in the west), and actors Ivan

Mozzukhin (Mosjoukine) and Natalia Lissenko. Also in France were the Russian-Polish

animator Madislaw Starewicz (in French Ladislas Starewitch), with his own studio at

Fontenay-sous-Bois, and the producer Pavel Thiemann, who settled at Joinville.

Ermolieff moved to Berlin, where a sizeable émigré community soon developed. He

brought with him Strizhevsky and Protazanov and drew Georgi Azagarov, who was

already there, into working with him. Another major Russian producer, Dmitri

Kharitonov, also emigrated, and in 1923 the major film company of Vladimir Vengerov

and Hugo Stinnes was created, bringing together many Russians who had settled in

Germany. Among the most important Russian actors working in Germany in the 1920s

were Vladimir Gaidarov, Olga Gsovskaya, and Olga Chekhova (Tschekowa) -- the latter

also a producer and director. Many film people moved between the two major centres of

Russian emigration, including Tourjansky, Volkov, and Mosjoukine.

The director Alexander Uralsky, the actresses Tatiana and Varvara Yanova, and the actors

Osip Runich and Mikhail Vavich became the centre of a film community that settled in

Italy. In Czechoslovakia the Russian diaspora was represented in the early 1920s by Vera

Orlova, Vladimir Massalitinov, and others, joined later in the decade by the famous Soviet

actress Vera Baranovskaya, who moved to Prague and established a new reputation for

herself there.

Hollywood became a centre of Russian film émigrés in the second half of the 1920s.

Besides Tourjansky and Mosjoukine (who did not stay long), Russians who came to seek

their fortune in America included actresses Anna Sten and Maria Uspenskaya

(Ouspenskaya), actors Vladimir Sokolov and Mikhail (Michael) Chekhov, nephew of the

playwright, and directors Ryszard Boleslawski (Richard Boleslawsky), Fyodor Otsep, and

Dmitri Bukhovetsky (Dimitri Buchowetzki). America created a powerful Russian myth in

the cinema, and at the same time, according to the recollections of contemporaries, was

capable of swallowing the émigrés and absorbing them into itself. The overriding idea of

the Russian emigration, to preserve Russian culture abroad intact in order to bring it back

to Russia when the Bolsheviks were overthrown, was impossible in practice in America.

Hollywood harshly imposed its own standards, and the most authentically Russian films

produced by the emigration were those of the émigré colony in France, clustered around

the most intensely Russian studio, Ermolieff-Film (Albatros).

The style of the Russian cinema in France could be defined as 'conservationist',

attempting to preserve the traditions of Russian pre-revolutionary cinema but gradually

giving ground to the demands of its western context. A number of films were direct

remakes of pre-revolutionary works. Protazanov remade his 1915 film The Prosecutor in

1921 as Justice d'abord ('Justice above all'), while Tourjansky remade Yevgeny Bauer's

Song of Triumphant Love under the same title in 1923. But there were also 'indirect

remakes', covering the same subjects and using the thematic structures of pre-

revolutionary films, such as Tourjansky's Le XVme Prélude de Chopin (Chopin's

Fifteenth Prelude, 1922), which repeats motifs from his earlier The Gentry's Ball ( 1918).

It is interesting that in both his French films Tourjansky uses Bauer's frame composition

and his method of articulating space by splitting the action in several layers at various

degrees of distance from the camera. The theme of visions appearing to characters who

are poised between the real and unreal worlds and expressive of the mystical

consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia of the early 1900s, which was widely used in

pre-revolutionary cinema, is transformed in émigré cinema into a subjectbased unreality.

This may take the form of hallucinations, as in Tourjansky's Song of Triumphant Love, or

delirium, as in the same director's Michel Strogoff ( 1926). More often, however, it is

represented as dream -- as in Angoissante Aventure ('Dreadful adventure', 1920) or

Mosjoukine's Le Brasier ardent ('The burning brazier', 1923) -- and is used by the émigrés

as a persistent metaphor of their post-revolutionary existence as something temporary and

transitory, which can only end with a happy awakening. Thus one of the major canons of

the pre-revolutionary film is broken -- the obligatory tragic finale, or 'Russian ending'. For

western audiences such an ending was acceptable only in the case of the classic

melodrama, such as Volkov's Kean, ou désordre et gÉnie ('Kean, or disorder and genius',

1923). Increasingly the ÉmigrÉ film-makers were forced to surrender this position --

though to varying degrees in different countries. Hollywood categorically demanded a

happy ending. For example, Dimitri Buchowetzki, working in 1925 on a film version of

Anna Karenina, felt obliged to prepare a version of the screenplay in which Anna turns

out to have thrown herself under the train only in dream and in actual fact she marries

Vronsky. In France the film-makers surrendered their position only after a longer struggle.

Distortion of the Russian classics was seen as a sacrilege, which was only conceded in the

1930s, as in Tourjansky's adaptation of Pushkin's story 'The Stationmaster' (under the title

Nostalgie) in 1937. More often a compromise was reached. For example, in Song of

Triumphant Love, Turgenev's story is simply left incomplete; it breaks off on a happy

note, creating for western filmgoers the sensation of a happy ending, while directing

Russians to the mystical tragic finale of the literary source. Alternatively use is made of a

double ending, with a happy end tacked on to the 'Russian finale', so that in Angoissante

Aventure the hero is shown awakening from a nightmare, while in Chopin's Fifteenth

Prelude the heroine's suicide is forestalled by chance.

Wedded as they were to the values of a conservative consciousness, and unwilling to give

up the traditions of pre-revolutionary cinema with its slowed-down rhythm and pace of

action, the ÉmigrÉs showed themselves unreceptive to the avant-garde experiment that

typified western cinema of the 1920s, particularly in France. The only exception was

Mosjoukine's Le Brasier ardent, which in this respect sets itself apart from the rest of

ÉmigrÉ cinema. The traditional approach, the lack of interest in experiment with

montage, the centrality of the actor, all distinguish the style of ÉmigrÉ cinerna from its

contemporary Soviet counterpart in the 1920s. It is significant that, according to

contemporary testimony, Le Brasier ardent was the only émigré film to exercise any

influence on the young directors of the Soviet cinema.

THE SOVIET STYLE

In contrast to the émigrés, the young Soviet directors strove to break the link with their

pre-revolutionary heritage completely. Their desire to create a new cinema reflected an

idea of renouncing the old world which was widespread in Russia in those years.

A commitment to reality in the cinema -- and particularly to the rapidly changing reality

of the Revolution -- came through the use of montage to transform cinematic

representation. In part this came about through economic necessity, coupled with a certain

unconscious aggression towards the past. With raw film in short supply, one way for the

cinema to develop was through the re-editing of old films, sometimes even on the

negative. With this in view, a special 'Re-editing Department' was created in the

production section of the Moscow Film Committee. According to film historian Veniamin

Vishnevsky, Vladimir Gardin was the first Soviet theoretician of montage. On 10

February 1919 Gardin delivered a lecture to the Re-editing Department on montage as

one of the fundamentals of film art. This lecture had a great impact on his colleagues,

notably on Lev Kuleshov. Kuleshov, whose famous 'experiments' are traditionally

considered the origin of the Soviet concept of montage, was, according to Vishnevsky,

developing ideas put forward by Gardin.

The best known of these experiments -- the 'Kuleshov effect' -- took the form of a still

close-up of the face of the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin, juxtaposed to three different frames: a

plate of soup, a dead woman in a coffin, and a child playing. As a result of the

juxtaposition the audience had the impression that the expression on the actor's face

altered, while the background (taken from an unknown pre-revolutionary film) remained

unchanged. With this experiment Kuleshov sought to confirm one of the laws of montage

that he had discovered: that the meaning of a montage sequence in cinema is determined

not by the content of the montage elements, but by their juxtaposition. This experiment,

known in the west from the lecture 'Model instead of actor' given in London by Vsevolod

Pudovkin in 1929 (and therefore often incorrectly referred to as the Pudovkin effect), was

sometimes seen by contemporaries not as a manifestation of the avantgarde thinking of

the new epoch, but as evidence of the vandalism of the Soviet cinema towards its

predecessors. Thus Moisei Aleinikov (head of the Rus film studio and later of

Mezhrabpom-Film) describes in his memoirs how Kuleshov's 'montage people', wearing

leather jackets and carrying revolvers, used to 'arrest' old film negatives in the studio, in

order to re-edit this 'rubbish . . . filmed by the bourgeoisie' into new revolutionary film --

there being no raw film in the country from which new films could be made.

In the early days, the embryonic Soviet cinema was heavily dependent on the principle of

creation through destruction. The smashing of the old commercial structures of the genre

film began almost at once. In 1919 a wave of propaganda films appeared, with titles like

Daredevil, Their Eyes were Opened, We Are above Vengeance, or For the Red Banner,

dedicated to the first anniversary of the Revolutionary Army. These agitki (agitational

pieces), which were to become a regular feature of early Soviet cinema, were shown

throughout the country with the aid of specially equipped mobile cinemas and of the

famous 'Agit-trains', the first of which set out for the countryside under the direction of

M. I. Kalinin in April 1919.

On 7 November 1920 shooting began on a mass-action film of the storming of the Winter

Palace. The concept of the action combined the principle of the play-film and the

'unplayed film' which was fundamental to the idea of the filmed chronicle. The film also

introduced the concept of group authorship (the production was the work of thirteen

directors headed by Nikolai Yevreinov), the de-individualizing of the actor (10,000 people

took part in the filming), a heightened concept of the audience (the performance was

played out in the presence of 100,000 people), and, finally, a blurring of the dividing line

between theatre and cinema (theatre was being enacted in the square, but being shot on

film).

Stage-screen hybrids were generally typical of Soviet cinema in the early 1920s. Grigory

Kozintsev's and Leonid Trauberg's theatrical productions of The Marriage (Zhenit'ba)

included screen projection in their structure, as did Eisenstein's show The Wise Man

(Mudrets), with its film interlude 'Glumov's Diary', and Gardin's production The Iron Heel

(Zheleznaya pyata). This technique goes back to pre-revolutionary experiments in the

theatre, but the Soviet directors seem to have been unaware of this and to have assumed

that here too they were the destroyers of tradition.

The idea of collective authorship was also important in the 1920s. The first group to be

formed (in 1919) was Kuleshov's and included Pudovkin, Boris Barnet, V. P. Fogel, and

others. Its work was based on the rejection of the pre-revolutionary 'psychological drama'

and it introduced a new concept of acting: the notion of the 'model' (a term suggested by

Turkin in 1918) in which psychological embodiment of character is replaced by the study

of reflexes and the automating of the acting.

Kuleshov's group was followed by one headed by Dziga Vertov (pseudonym of Denis

Arkadevich Kaufman), including among its members Vertov's wife Elisaveta Svilova and

his brother Mikhail, as well as A. M. Rodchenko and others. In its manifestos, published

in the magazines Kinofot and LEF. Vertov's group totally rejected the very concept of the

actor ('a danger', 'an error'), and the idea of play-films with a story-line. The aim of the

Kino-Eye group was to capture 'life taken unawares', kino-pravda (cine-truth), 'revolution

by newsreel' -- based on the LEF idea of the 'literature of fact', in response to the call of

the constructivists to eliminate 'art itself'. However the transformation of reality by means

of the new language of cinema when it was transferred to the screen was permitted, and

the 'kino eye' was endowed with the ability to manipulate time and space.

Eisenstein's cine-collective 'The Iron Five' ( G. V. Alexandrov, M. M. Shtraukh, A. I.

Levshin, M. I. Gomorov, A. A. Antonov) came into being in 1923. In his very first

theoretical work Eisenstein proposed replacing the plot in the cinema by a montage of

attractions, and in his first full-length film, The Strike (Stachka, 1925), he put forward the

masses as hero as an alternative to the Russian prerevolutionary and contemporary

western system of stars. The frame for Eisenstein was an independently significant unit of

montage, an 'attraction' -- that is, a shock for the audience's perception -- and the 'montage

of attractions' was a sequence of shocks having an effect on the spectator and provoking a

response reaction in such a creatively productive way that the spectator became, as it

were, the director's co-author in creating the film text. Herein lay the chief difference

between Eisenstein's concept of montage and that of Kuleshov, within whose system the

spectator was allotted a passive role and was simply the recipient of prepared information.

According to Kuleshov's theory the role of the frame in a montage sequence was

equivalent to that of the letter in a word and it was not the content of each frame which

was significant but their juxtaposition.

Eisenstein was indebted to Kuleshov for the idea itself of the frame as a unit of montage.

According to the recollections of eyewitnesses, Eisenstein learnt to construct mass scenes

from the example of Kuleshov's The Death Ray (Luch smerti, 1925). He also

acknowledged his indebtedness to the re-editing school, mainly via the re-editing of

foreign films for Soviet distribution, in which he was involved working for Esfir Shub. As

for the idea of attractions, Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg recollect that it was

suggested to Eisenstein by their show The Marriage, which represented a sequence of

attractions. Eisenstein first combined attractions into a montage series in his stage

production of The Wise Man in 1923.

FEX (The Factory of the Eccentric Actor) came into being in Leningrad under the

leadership of Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg in 1921 as a theatrical workshop

and from 1924 became a cinematographic collective. The emphasis on 'eccentrism' put

forward by FEX testified on the one hand to their orientation towards 'low' genres (circus,

vaudeville, the variety stage) and their rejection of the traditions of the 'serious' art of the

salon. On the other hand it encoded the self-perception of the artists of the Leningrad

school as new provincials, after the capital was moved to Moscow. On the cover of the

manifesto Eccentrism ( 1922, with articles by Kozintsev, Kryzhitsky, Trauberg, and

Yutkevich) the place of publication was indicated as 'Ex-centropolis' -- that is, Leningrad

(formerly Petrograd), now no longer the centre and therefore literally 'eccentric'. The

composition of the FEX acting troupe changed over time, as did its direction, and from

1926 it continued in being in name only.

Also based in Leningrad was a rival group, KEM (Experimental Cinema Workshop), led

by Friedrich Ermler, Edward Johanson, and Sergei Vasiliev. Unlike FEX, KEM was

purely a film group. Rejecting the Stanislavsky system, it modelled itself on the ideas of

Vsevolod Meyerhold, stressing professionalism above inspiration in the actor's craft. In

1927, at the height of the montage period, Ermler declared, 'the actor and not the frame

makes films', but this provocative statement was belied by his own formally subtle

Oblomok imperii ('Fragment of an empire', 1929).

'Eccentric' techniques, based on circus and vaudeville, were particularly prominent in

short films, including Ermler's Skarlatina ('Scarlet fever', 1924), Pudovkin and

Shpikovsky's Chess Fever (Shakhmatnaya goryachka, 1925), and Yutkevich's

Radiodetektiv ('The radio detective', 1926). The quintessence of the new genre, however,

was Kozintsev and Trauberg's Adventures of Oktyabrina (Pokhozdeniya Oktyabriny,

1924), which sought, in Trauberg's words, to combine the theme of an agitka with

political features from the Soviet satirical press, the tricks of American comics, and a

headlong montage rhythm that could outdo the French avant-garde.

What united all tendencies was a shared cult of Charlie Chaplin. Constructivists such as

Alexei Gan and Dziga Vertov saw Chaplin as a model to counterpoise to the

prerevolutionary tradition. For the FEX group, he was the embodiment of the Eccentric

view of the world. Eisenstein wrote of the 'attractional qualities of the specific mechanics

of [Chaplin's] movements'. For Kuleshov as well as for the FEXes, he was the

embodiment of America.

The ' America' celebrated by the Soviet avant-garde was not so much a real place as an

emblem of the machineage rhythm of the twentieth century. For Kuleshov this America

functioned as a kind of notional montage space, which he made the subject of one of his

early experiments in 'creative geography', Tvorimaya zemnaya poverkhnost ('The earth's

surface created', 1920), where Khoklova and Obolensky 'emerge' from Gogol Boulevard

in Moscow on to the steps of the Capitol in Washington. In another experiment around the

same time, Tvorimiy chelovek ('The person being created') applied the same abstract

notion to the human body, putting together 'the back of one woman', 'the eyes of another',

and 'the legs of a third'.

This idea of the film author as demiurge was shared by other film-makers. In his 1923

manifesto Dziga Vertov spoke of the ability of the 'kino eye' to put together in montage a

person 'more perfect than the creation of Adam', while Kozintsev and Trauberg in their

unfilmed scenario Zhenshchina Edisona ('Edison's woman', 1923) envisaged the creation

of a new Eve, the daughter of Edison and the primogenitrix of the new world.

Parallel with the avant-garde tendency, an academic and traditional cinema also survived

in the Soviet Union, practised largely by directors such as A. Ivanovsky, C. Sabinsky, and

P. Chardynin who had already been working in Russia before the Revolution. Needless to

say, this cinema was not entirely conservative. Rather it tended to mix traditional

technique with artificially introduced 'revolutionary' subject-matter. An interesting

example of this is Gardin's Prizrak brodit po Yevropie ('A spectre is haunting Europe',

1923). Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death', this film has a

subtly conceived montage but traditional narration, with a double-exposure nightmare

scene in which the masses rising in revolution confront the Emperor, who is in love with a

shepherdess. The masses are victorious, the Emperor and his shepherdess are consumed

by fire, but the ending is implausible, since the film is made in the melodramatic genre

leading the audience to sympathize with the 'hero' and 'heroine' rather than with the

depersonalized masses. Less ambiguous was Aelita ( 1924), made by Yakov Protazanov

on his return to the Soviet Union and based on the revolutionary sciencefiction fantasy by

Alexei Tolstoy, but incorporating all the staple elements and poetic conventions of the

émigré film.

By the Law (Po zakonu, 1926), adapted by Viktor Shklovsky from a story by Jack

London, and directed by Lev Kuleshov

Constructing new genres was in fact a major problem of Soviet film-makers in the 1920s.

An implicit model early in the decade, according to Adrian Piotrovsky ( 1969), was the

Griffith melodrama, both at the level of plot ('disasterpursuit-rescue') and at that of

expressive technique (montage of details, exploitation of emotional attractions,

symbolism of objects). Plot features of the early Soviet film include the creation of the

role of the new Soviet detective -- as in Kuleshov's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr

West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (Neobychainiye priklucheniya mistera Vesta v stranie

bolshevikov, 1924) -- while at the micro-level there developed techniques of 'montage of

attractions' (Eisenstein) and 'rhythmically regulated montage' (the 'Kino-Eye' group).

A fusion of new techniques, to some degree transcending the polemics over the 'played'

and 'unplayed' film, is found in the development in the mid-1920s of the 'historical

revolutionary epic'. Films in this category were distinguished by non-traditional plot

structure and narration, intensive montage, and rich use of metaphor and experiments in

film language, while fulfilling a social and ideological requirement by their treatment of

revolutionary themes. They include such classics as Eisen stein 's The Strike and The

Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potëmkin, 1925), Pudovkin's Mother (Mat, 1926), The

End of St Petersburg (Koniets Sankt-Peterburga, 1927), and The Heir of Genghis Khan

(Potomok Chingis-Khana, 1928-also known as Storm over Asia), and Alexander

Dovzhenko's Zvenigora ( 1927) and Arsenal ( 1929).

The 'standardization' of film genres which (according to Piotrovsky) took place after 1925

also led to the production of historical epics of a more academic type, such as Ivanovsky's

Dekabritsky ('The Decembrists', 1927) or Yuri Tarich 's Krylya kholopa ('Wings of the

serf', 1926), made under the influence of the Moscow Arts Theatre. The continuing battle

between traditionalists and innovators spurred Kozintsev and Trauberg and the FEX

group to abandon their commitment to purely contemporary subjects and to make their

own film about the Decembrist movement, The Club of the Big Deed (Soyuz velikova

dela, or SVD), later in 1927.

SVD had as script-writers the formalist theoreticians Yuri Tynyanov and Yuli Oksman,

and from 1926 the Soviet silent cinema enters what Eisenstein was to call its 'second

literary period'. Intense debates took place about the role of the scenario. At one extreme

were Vertov, who rejected the idea of the played film entirely, and the writer Osip Brik,

who went so far as to propose writing the scenario after the film had been shot. At the

other were Ippolit Sokolov and the proponents of the 'iron scenario' in which every shot

was numbered and pre-planned in advance. Against the iron scenario, Eisenstein proposed

an 'emotional' scenario, a 'stenographic record of the impulse', which would assist the

director in finding a visual incarnation for the idea.

On the whole the intervention of the formalist writers and critics led to at least a partial

reintegration of literary values into Soviet cinema. This is evident in Tynyanov's script for

The Overcoat (Shiniel, 1926), adapted from Gogol and directed by Kozintsev and

Trauberg, and Viktor Shklovsky's for Kuleshov's By the Law (Po zakonu, 1926), based on

Jack London's story 'The Unexpected'. But Shklovsky also contributed to the transfer of

some of the cinematic and anti-literary values of Vertov's 'fact films' to the fiction film, as

in his work on Abram Room's Bed and Sofa (Tretya Meshchanskaya, 1927), a film

showing careful attention to the detail of everyday life.

The everyday genre, with its interest in the detail of surrounding reality, including

industry, gradually began to occupy a dominating position in Soviet cinema, with films

like Petrov-Bytov's Vodororot ('The whirlpool') and Ermler's Dom v sugrobakh ('The

house in the snowdrifts', 1928), not to mention Eisenstein's The General Line ( 1929).

Everyday life is also central to the comedies of Boris Barnet, such as The Girl with the

Hatbox (Devushka s korobkoi, 1927) and The House on Trubnaya Square (Dom na

Trubnoi, 1928), where it merges with another important trend in Soviet cinema -- the

urbanist film. Here the theme is the counterpoising of the city and the provinces, with the

city as a new world opening up before the new arrival from the provinces, as in Ermler's

Katka bumazhny ranet ('Katya's reinette apples'), Room's V bolshom gorodie ('In the big

city'), Y. Zhelyabuzhsky's V gorod vkhodit nelzya ('No entry to the city'), and also

Pudovkin's The End of St Petersburg.

By the end of the decade a contradictory situation had arisen in Soviet cinema. The

montage cinema had reached a peak, or rather several peaks, since there were divergent

tendencies within it. On the one side was the theory of intellectual cinema, which

Eisenstein had begun to develop at the time when he was working on October (Oktyabr,

1927), and which took definitive shape in 1929 with his article 'The Fourth Dimension in

the Cinema' and came to exercise an important influence on the avantgarde. And on the

other side stood the so-called 'lyrical' or 'emotional' cinema, functioning through image-

symbols and typified by Dovzhenko's films Zvenigora ( 1927) and Arsenal ( 1929),

Nikolai Shengelai's Elisso ( 1928), and Yevgeni Chervyakov 's Girl from the Distant

River, My Son (Moi syn, 1928), and Golden Beak (Zolotoi klyuv). Trauberg recalls that,

under the influence of Eisenstein's article on the Fourth Dimension, he and Kozintsev

completely altered the montage principle of their film New Babylon (Novy Vavilon,

1929), abandoning 'linkage of the action' in plot development in favour of what Eisenstein

called the 'conflicting combination of overtones of the intellectual order'. They then saw

Pudovkin's freshly released The End of St Petersburg, which stood at the midway point

between the intellectual and emotional poles, and under its influence nearly remade the

film all over again.

This period, which was the high point of the development of the intellectual and lyrical-

symbolic montage cinema and the cinema of the implied plot, created at the same time a

parallel system in the commercial genre film -- notably in the work of Gardin ( The Poet

and the Tsar), Chardynin ( Behind the Monastery Wall), and Konstantin Eggert ( The

Bear's Wedding (Medviezhya svadba), 1926). But by the end of the decade articles began

to appear in the critical literature which censured both the innovators ('left-wing

deviation') and the traditionalists ('right-wing deviation'). In the spring of 1928 an All

Union Party conference on the cinema was called and the demand for 'a form which the

millions can understand' was put forward as the main aesthetic criterion in evaluating a

film. But the rejection of the commercial cinema, which furthermore was largely being

created by film-makers of the old school, bore witness to the fact that more than formal

questions were at stake. 'Purges' began in the cinema, and the images of the White Guard,

the kulak, the spy, or the White émigré wrecker who had insinuated himself into Soviet

Russia began to crop up in films with increasing frequency. Films like Protazanov's Yego

prizyv ('His call', 1925), Zhelyabuzhsky's No Entry to the City, Johanson's Na dalyokom

beregu ('On the far shore', 1927), and G. Stabova's Lesnoi cheloviek ('Forest man', 1928)

bear disturbing witness to this new trend. The increasingly powerful role of RAPP in

literature began to create a situation of ideological pressure of which the cinema too

became a target.

New Babylon (Novy Vavilon, 1929), Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's epic story

of the Paris Commune

Besides the change in the political climate, the arrival of sound played a significant part in

the sequence of epochs in Soviet cinema. Already in 1928-9, before the new invention

had been introduced in the Soviet cinema, Soviet film-makers began to discuss its likely

implication. In 1928 Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov put forward the concept of

audio-visual counterpoint in a statement

'The Future of the Sound Film'. The engineers Shorin (Leningrad) and Tager ( Moscow)

were working at that time to create a sound-recording system for Soviet film studios. The

introduction of sound into the cinema becomes in a certain sense state policy. Pudovkin's

film Prostoi sluchai ('A simple case'), also known as Ochen'khorosho zhivyotsya ('Life is

very good', 1932), and Kozintsev and Trauberg's Odna ('Alone', 1931), conceived as

silent, were on orders from above 'adapted for sound', as a result of which they reached

the screen after a one- to two-year delay. Probably those in charge saw in the talking

picture one of the ways of bringing the cinema to the masses which the 1928 conference

had urged. And although for several more years, because of the absence of sound

projectors in country areas, silent films continued to be made alongside talkies (notably

Mikhail Romm's Boule de suif and Alex ander Medvedkin 's Happiness (Shchastie), both

of 1934), one can say that the silent film as an art form reached its zenith in Soviet cinema

by 1929, in which year it ceased to progress, yielding place to its successor.

Bibliography

Christie, Ian, and Taylor, Richard (eds.) ( 1988), The Film Factory.

Leyda, Jay ( 1960), Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film.

Piotrovsky, Adrian ( 1969), Teatr, Kino, Zhizn ('Theatre, cinema, life').

Istoriya sovietskogo kino v chetyryokh tomakh ('A history of the Soviet cinema in 4

volumes'), Vol. i: 1917-1931.

Lebedev, Nikolai ( 1965), Ocherk istorii kino SSSR. Nemoe kino (19181934) ('An outline

history of cinema in the USSR. Silent cinema').

Margolit, Yevgeny ( 1988), Sovietskoie kinoiskusstvo ('Soviet film art'). Moscow, 1988.

Ivan Mosjoukine (Ivan Ilich Mozzhukhin) (1889-1939)

Ivan Mosjoukine in the film he directed himself, Le Braiserardent ( 1923)

Born in Penza on 26 September 1889, the young Ivan Ilich Mozzhukhin went to law

school in Moscow for two years, but gave up his studies and left for Kiev, to pursue a

theatrical career. After two years touring the provinces, he returned to Moscow, where he

worked at several theatres including the Moscow Dramatic Theatre. He made his film

debut in 1911 in The Kreutzer Sonata, directed by Pyotr Chardynin, the first of many

films he was to make for the powerful Khanzhonkov Company. At first he was cast in a

variety of roles, from the comic in Brothers ( 1913), to the tragic hero of In the Hands of

Merciless Fate ( 1913). It was in 1914, while working with the director Yevgeny Bauer on

Life in Death ( 1914), that he developed what was to become his artistic trademark - a

steady, direct, tearfilled gaze turned full on the cinema audience. From this was born the

myth about the mystical power of Mozzhukhin's gaze. His role as a key dramatic and

melodramatic actor was confirmed in such films as Chardynin's Chrysanthemums ( 1914),

and Idols ( 1915), again with Bauer.

In 1915 he left Khanzhonkov and transferred to the Yermoliev studio. Here, under the

direction of Yakov Protazanov, the mystical element of his image was en hanced, while a

demonic edge entered into his richest characterizations - for example in The Queen of

Spades ( 1915) or Father Sergius ( 1917).

The ideas of the playwright A. Voznesensky helped Mozzhukhin to form a conception of

cinema which depended on the expressiveness of the actor's gaze, his gestures, his use of

pauses, and his ability to hypnotize his partner. Speech was to be avoided as much as

possible, and the ideal film would be devoid of all commentary and intertitles.

In 1919 Yermoliev and his troupe left Russia and set up in Paris. Mosjoukine under which

he was to become famous throughout Europe. His ideas on acting found reinforcement in

theories of cinema current in France at the time, most notably the idea of photogÉnie.

Towards the end of his Russian period an important new theme had emerged in his work;

the double or split personality. In the two-part epic Satan Triumphant ( 1917), directed by

Ch. Sabinsky, he played multiple roles, an experiment he repeated in Le Brasier ardent

( 1923), with himself as director. Doubles and doppelgängers surface many times in his

French films, most spectacularly in Feu Mathias Pascal ( 1925) adapted by Marcel

L'Herbier from a Pirandello story about a man believed dead who invents a new life for

himself.

Mosjoukine was also a poet, and in his poems he compares himself, as actor and as

émigré, to a werewolf, many sided and restless. From this sprang the figure of the eternal

wanderer ( Casanova, 1927) and the Tsar's courtier ( Michel Strogoff, 1926). But what

most preoccupied him during his French period was a constant wish to rid himself of the

'mystical' film star persona. He attempted this in various ways - by infantilizing and thus

caricaturing heroic roles, by a return to comedy, or by bringing opposing character types

together in one film. This conscious eclecticism was reinforced by his discovery of the

French avant-garde and of American cinema - notably Griffith, Chaplin, and Fairbanks.

His interest in America aroused, he moved there in 1927, appearing in just one film,

Edward Sloman's Surrender. Later than year he returned to Europe. In Germany he

rejoined some of his fellow émigrés, and himself played the role of the Russian émigrée

in two major films, Der weisse Teufel ( 1929) and Sergeant X ( 1931). However, as he

had always feared, speech in film proved to be a problem and in a foreign language even

more so. His last roles were few and of little consequence. On 17 January 1939 he died of

acute tuberculosis in a hospital for the poor.

NATALIA NUSSINOVA

SELECT FILMOGRAPHY

The Kreutzer Sonata ( 1911); Christmas Eve ( 1912); A Terrible Vengeance ( 1913); The

Sorrows of Sarah ( 1913); Satan Triumphant ( 1917); Little Ellie ( 1917); Father Sergius

( 1917); Le Brasier ardent (also dir.) ( 1923); Feu Mathias Pascal ( 1925); Michel Strogoff

( 1926); Casanova ( 1927); Surrender ( 1927); Der weisse Teufel ( 1929); Sergeant X

( 1931); Nitchevo ( 1936).

Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)

A drawing by Eisenstein for Ivan the Terrible ( 1944)

At age 25 Eisenstein was the enfant terrible of Soviet theatre; The Wiseman, his

irreverent, circus-style production of an Ostrovsky classic, marked a high point of

experimentation in the post-revolutionary stage. After two more productions Proletkult

invited Eisenstein to make a film. It became The Strike ( 1925), and Meyerhold's pupil

soon became the most famous Soviet film-maker. 'The cart dropped to pieces', he noted

some years later, 'and the driver dropped into cinema.'

Eisenstein brought his theatrical training into all his films. His version of Soviet typage

relied on the depsychologized. personifications he found in commedia dell'arte. His later

films unashamedly invoked the full resources of stylized lighting, costume, and sets.

Above all, Eisenstein's conception of expressive movement, exceeding norms of realism

and aimed at the direct excitation of the spectator, emerged again and again. In The Strike,

the workers' struggle with a foreman to blow a steam whistle becomes a calisthenic

exercise. In The Old and the New ( 1929), a woman's despairing act of flinging down a

plough transforms itself into a fierce gesture of defiance. The two-part Ivan the Terrible

( 1944, 1946) acquires its majestic pace through an instant-by-instant modulation of the

actor's movement.

Cinema was not only the next step in the development of theatre; Eisenstein considered

cinema the synthesis of all the arts. He found in the cinematic technique of montage

analogies to the juxtapositions of images in verse, to the inner monologue of Joyce's

Ulysses, to the rich 'intercutting' of action and dialogue in Dickens and Tolstoy. In The

Battleship Potemkin ( 1925) a sailor furiously smashes a plate he is washing; the

fragmentation of the action parallels him to Myron's Discus-Thrower. Eisenstein posited a

'polyphonic' montage in cinema that would interweave pictorial motifs. And the arrival of

sound technology led him to posit a 'vertical' montage between image and sound which

would create the inner unity achieved in Wagnerian music drama.

Expressive movement and montage, the cornerstones of Eisehstein's aesthetic, could find

fulfilment in cinema as in no other art. He argues that in Alexander Nevsky ( 1938)

vertical montage brings out the emotional dynamic latent in both image and musical

score, intensifying the suspenseful anticipation of Alexander's troops awaiting the

Teutonic Knights' attack. Earlier in his career, he had suggested that The

Wiseman's'montage of attractions', its assembly of perceptual 'shocks', could rouse the

audience to emotion and, eventually, reflection. Making October ( 1928), he speculated

that, like haiku poetry and Joycean stream of consciousness, the juxtapositions of shots

can create purely conceptual associations. October's most famous passage of 'intellectual

montage', the little disquisition on God and Country, uses images and titles to demonstrate

the mystification surrounding religion and patriotism. Montage, Eisenstein believed,

would allow him to make a film of Marx's Capital.

Throughout the silent era Eisenstein assumed that his aesthetic experimentation could be

harmonized with the propaganda dictates of the State. Each of his silent films begins with

an epigraph from Lenin, and each depicts a key moment in the myth of Bolshevik

ascension: the pre-revolutionary struggles ( The Strike), the 1905 revolution (Potemkin),

the Bolshevik coup ( October), and contemporary agricultural policy ( The Old and the

New). The world-wide success of Potemkin won sympathy and respect for the regime;

who could not be moved by Eisenstein's shocking portrayal of the tsarist troops

massacring innocents on the Odessa Steps? After a stay in Hollywood in 1930 and an

attempt to make an independent film in Mexico ( 1930-2), Eisenstein returned to a Soviet

Union in the grip of Stalin. The film industry was in the process of repudiating the

montage experiments of the silent era, and soon a conception of 'Socialist Realism'

became official policy. Eisenstein's teaching at the State Film Academy allowed him to

explore ways of reconciling his own interests with the new standards, but his efforts to put

his ideas into practice in Bezhin Meadow ( 1935-7) ran into opposition and the film was

halted.

He had more success with Nevsky, which coincided with Stalin's Russophilia and served

as timely propaganda against German invasion. Eisenstein won the Order of Lenin. The

first part of Ivan the Terrible also enhanced his stature. Stalin had encouraged a

'progressive' reading of certain tsars, and Eisenstein portrayed his hero as a decisive ruler

bent on unifying Russia.But the second part of the projected Ivan trilogy fell afoul of

policy-makers. Ivan, hesitating to kill his enemies, was now judged too 'Hamlet-like', and

the film was banned by the Central Committee. It is likely that this action was part of a

general reassertion of Party control of the arts, which had enjoyed considerable latitude

during the war. The attack on Ivan Part Two led Eisenstein, already in poor health, to

greater isolation. He died in 1948, under a cloud of criticism which would not be lifted for

a decade. Ironically, his films and writings were far more visible in the west than in the

USSR, and, although his reputation has undergone periodic reappraisals, he has remained

the most celebrated and influential representative of Soviet film culture.DAVID

BORDWELLSELECT FILMOGRAPHY Stachka (The Strike) ( 1925); Bronenosets

'Potemkin' (The Battleship Potemkin) ( 1925); Oktyabr (October / Ten Days that Shook

the World) ( 1928); Staroe i novoe (The Old and the New); Generalnaya Liniya ('The

general line') ( 1929). Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) ( 1935-7); Alexander Nevsky ( 1938);

Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible) Part I ( 1944); Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible) Part II

( 1946)

A scene from Bezhin Meadow ( 1935-7). The film itself is lost, and all that survive are a

couple of frames of each shot

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bordwell, David ( 1993), The Cinema of Eisenstein.

Eisenstein, Sergei ( 1949). Film Form: Essays in Film Theory.

--- ( 1992), Towards a Theory of Montage.

--- ( 1988), Writings, 1922-34.

Leyda, Jay, and Voynow, Zina (eds.) ( 1982), Eisenstein at Work.

Nizhny, Vladimir ( 1962), Lessons with Eisenstein.

Seton, Marie ( 1952), Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography

Yiddish Cinema in Europe

MAREK AND MALGORZATA HENDRYKOWSKI

No panorama of early European cinema can be complete without mention of the unique

phenomenon of the transnational Yiddish cinema, which flourished in eastern and central

Europe throughout the silent period and into the 1930s. This Yiddish cinema derived from

the extra-territorial tradition of European Jewish culture and literature rooted in the

Yiddish language. Yiddish is a language of exceptional expressiveness, highly developed

idiom, and rich vocabulary, which by the turn of the century had become the mother

tongue of over 10 million Jews, living mostly in central and eastern Europe but also as

part of the Jewish diaspora in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, and elsewhere in the

New World.

THE YIDDISH CULTURAL TRADITION

Throughout eastern and central Europe Yiddish had a full-fledged literature, comparable

with other European national literatures. Alongside élite works aspiring to the rank of

canonical literature, more popular prose was also printed in instalments in cheap pamphlet

form. Leading representatives of Yiddish literature at the turn of the century include

Avrom Goldfadn, father of the Jewish theatre, Yankev Gordin, An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvil

Rapoport), Yitskhok Leyb Perets, Sholem Ash, Yoysef Opatoshu (Yoysef Meyer

Opatovski), and Sholem Aleykhem (Sholem Rabinowicz), and it was often to the works

of these authors that the nascent Yiddish cinema turned for inspiration in the 1910s and

1920s.

Yiddish cinema has its roots in Jewish drama and theatre of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, stemming from the tradition of the Purim-Shpil and incorporating

elements of the so-called 'shundroman' or popular fiction. It was in 1892 that the actress

Ester Rokhl Kaminska, 'the Jewish Eleonora Duse', first appeared in the Eldorado theatre

in Warsaw. By 1911 three Jewish theatres were open in that city: Kaminski's Literary

Troupe at the Dynasy, the Elizeum, and the Orion, while the famous Vilner troupe was

started in Vilna (now Vilnius) by Mordkhe Mazo in 1916. In 1918, on the other side of the

Atlantic, Yankev (Jacob) Ben-Ami, together with Moris Shvarts, founded the even more

famous Yiddish Arts Theatre in New York.

The Yiddish theatrical repertory consisted of biblical tales, eastern European legends, and

Jewish folk customs. Scenes generating a religious aura were often interwoven with

dances and songs. Their changing atmosphere betrayed a permanent sense of dread, and

combined drama and tragedy with tearful, melodramatic scenes and a devastating wit that

triggered off contagious laughter. The performances owed their unique character and

expressiveness to their (sometimes satirical) borrowing from Hasidic tradition, and

Yiddish theatrical plays and films cannot be fully understood without reference to eastern

European Hasidism, with its own specific brand of mysticism and philosophy, and

recurrent interest in themes of individual Romantic rebellion of the individual and the

conflict of tradition and assimilation.

SILENT FILM

From the outset Yiddish films enjoyed considerable popularity not only with Jewish

audiences but among spectators of other nationalities in search of the exotic. They were

made in Poland, Russia, Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. In Russia they

were produced by the S. Mintus Company in Riga ( Latvia), the Mizrakh and Mirograf

Company in Odessa, and by the Kharitonov, Khanzhonkov, and Pathé production

companies in Moscow, and elsewhere. But the majority originated from Poland, whose

Jews, characterized by a particularly strong feeling of their own national identity,

accounted for some 10 per cent of the population. In the early years of this century, more

than 80 per cent of the more than 400,000strong Jewish population of Warsaw spoke and

read Yiddish.

In Poland the main centre of Yiddish film production was Warsaw, where the first

production company, Sila, was founded by Mordkhe (Mordka) Towbin. Among the films

produced by Sila before the outbreak of the First World War were four adapted from plays

by leading Yiddish playwright Yankev (Jacob) Gordin, starting in 1911 with Der vilder

Foter (The Cruel Father) with Herman Sieracki in the title-role and Zina Goldshteyn in

the role of the daughter. Sila also engaged the services of members of the theatrical

Kaminski family. Avrom Yitskhok Kaminski directed Destitute Murder ( 1911) and the

mystical drama God, Man and Devil ( 1912), while Mirele Efros ( 1912), directed by

Andrzej Marek (Marek Arnshteyn or Orenshteyn), starred both Ester Rokhl Kaminska

and Ida Kaminska, who made her début in the role of the boy Shloymele.

In 1913 a dynamic new Yiddish film enterprise called Kosmofilm was founded in Warsaw

by Shmuel Ginzberg and Henryk Finkelstein. In 1913-14 Kosmofilm produced screenings

of further plays by Gordin: Der Umbakanter (Love and Death or A Stranger), Gots Shtrof

(God's Punishment), Dem Khagzns Tokhter (The Cantor's Daughter), and Di Shkhite, and

a new version of Di Shtifmuter (The Stepmother), already filmed by Sila a couple of

years earlier. The last film to be made by Kosmofilm with captions in Yiddish before the

German invasion of Warsaw on 5 August 1915 was Di farshtoysene Tokhter (The

Repudiated Daughter), based on the play by Avrom Goldfadn, with the participation of

Ester Rokhl Kaminska.

Jewish themes also attracted the attention of filmmakers in Germany before and during

the First World War. Shylock von Krakau (Kol Nidre, 1913) was based on the novella by

Felix Salten, directed by Carl Wilhelm, and designed by Hermann Warm, with the well-

known actor Rudolf Schildkraut in the title-role, and Der gelbe Schein (The Yellow

Ticket, 1918) was filmed for Ufa in occupied Warsaw by Victor Janson, with Polish

actress Pola Negri in the main role.

Indigenous production revived after the war. Three outstanding Yiddish films made in

Poland in the 1920s were: Tkies Kaf (The Oath, 1924), directed by Zygmunt Turkow; Der

Lamedvovnik (One of the Thirty-six, 1925) by Henryk Szaro; and In Poylishe Velder (In

Polish Woods, 1929), directed by Jonas Turkow, an adaptation of Yoysef Opatoshu's

bestselling novel of the same title, with both Polish and Jewish actors playing the roles.

Like The Oath, this film addressed the fundamental question of Jewish assimilation in

nineteenth-century Poland and participation alongside the Poles in the January Uprising

of 1863 against Russia. Yiddish films continued to be made in the USSR. Yidishe Glikn

(Jewish Luck, 1925), by Alexander Granovski, was based on the famous Menakhem-

Mendl story-cycle by Sholem Aleykhem, and was made with the participation of actors

from the Habima Theatre and the great Soviet Yiddish actor Shloyme Mikhoels.

Blondzhende Shtern (Wandering Stars, 1927), directed by Grigory Gricher Cherikover,

was a story about a Jewish boy who runs away from the parental home and years later

becomes a famous violinist. It too was based on a story by Aleykhein and had a script by

Isaac Babel. Babel changed Aleykhem's story considerably in order to make it

ideologically acceptable -- an effort that proved ultimately vain, since this great writer and

friend and confidant of Sergei Eisenstein was to die in the purges not many years later.

Gricher Cherikover also made a number of other Yiddish films, including Skvoz Slezy

( 1928) which enjoyed worldwide fame under its American title Laughter through Tears.

A classic of Yiddish cinema: Yiddle with his Fiddle (Yidl mitn fidl, 1936), produced and

directed by. Joseph Green and starring Molly Picon

SOUND CINEMA

The introduction of sound at the beginning of the 1930s resulted in a brief hiatus, but the

second half of the decade proved to be a golden age for the Yiddish cinema, with

synchronized dialogue now able to capture the richness of the language. Two Polish

companies specialized in Yiddish films, Joseph Green's Green-Film, and Shaul and

Yitskhok Goskind's Kinor. Aleksander Ford created fictionalized documents such as Sabra

Halutzim ( 1934) with the participation of actors from the Jewish Theatre, and We're on

our Way (Mir kumen on, 1935). Together with Jan NowinaPrzybylski, the enterprising

producer and director Joseph Green (Yoysef Grinberg, a native of Lódz) made Yiddle

with his Fiddle (Yidl mitn Fidl, 1936) with music by Abraham Ellstein and with Molly

Picon in the title-role, and The Purim Player (Der Purim-spiler, 1937) with Miriam

Kressin and Hymie Jacobson. With Konrad Tom he then directed Little Mother (Mamele,

1938) with the participation of Molly Picon. Then, in association with Leon Trystan, he

filmed A Little Letter to Mother (A Brivele der Mamen, 1938) with Lucy and Misha

Gehrman. The talented director Henryk Szaro (Szapiro) did a sound remake of The Oath

(Tkies Kaf, 1937) with Zygmunt Turkow as the prophet Elijah and with the participation

of the choir of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw. In 1937 Leon Jeannot directed Jolly

Paupers (Di Freylekhe Kabtsonim) with the participation of two famous Jewish comic

actors, Shimen (Szymon) Dzigan and Yisroel Shumakher. But the most important artistic

event of Yiddish cinema is rightly considered to be The Dybbuk (Der Dibek, 1937),

adapted from the play (and ethnographic survey materials) by An-ski and directed by

Michal Waszyfiski (Misha Wachsman). In this story, based on the old legend about the

unhappy love of a poor Talmud scholar for Lea, the daughter of a rich man, Hasidic

mysticism and symbolism come fully to the fore. The last Yiddish film to be produced in

Poland before the outbreak of war was Without a Home (On a Heym, 1939), directed by

Aleksander Marten (Marek Tennebaum, born in Lódz, and a refugee from Hitler's

Germany), based on the play by Yankev Gordin, with Shimen Dzigan, Yisroel

Shumakher, Adam Domb, and Ida Kaminska in the leading roles.

As life for European Jewry became increasingly threatened, the centre of Yiddish film

production shifted to the United States, where the Austrian-born émigré Edgar G. Ulmer

co-directed the popular success Green Fields (Grine Felder) with Yankev Ben-Ami.

Ulmer's varied and prolific career (he had been the assistant of F. W. Murnau and went on

to make numerous Hollywood B pictures) was interspersed with a number of other

Yiddish films including The Singing Blacksmith (Yankl der Shmid, 1938) and American

Matchmaker (Amerikaner Shadkhn, 1940). Gordin's Mirele Efros was remade by Josef

Berne in 1939, while Moris Shvarts of the Yiddish Arts Theatre crossed over to film

production to direct and act in Tevye der Milkhiker ( 1939).

The Holocaust took a cruel toll of Yiddish film-makers. Directors Henryk Szaro and

Marek Arnshteyn, actors Klara Segalowicz, Yitskhok Samberg, Dora Fakel, Abram Kurc,

and many others died in the Warsaw ghetto. Yiddish films continued to be made after the

war, but in the aftermath of the final solution the glorious past of Yiddish cinematography

assumed the special dimension of a value irredeemably lost.

Bibliography

Goldberg, Judith N. ( 1983), Laughter through Tears: The Yiddish Cinema.

Goldman, Eric A. ( 1988), Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present.

Hoberman, Jim ( 1991), Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds.

Shmeruk, Chone ( 1992), Historia literatury jidisz ('A history of Yiddish literature').

Japan: Before the Great Kanto Earthquake

HIROSHI KOMATSU

The apparatus of moving images, such as Edison's Kinetoscope, Lumière's

Cinématographe, Edison's Vitascope, and the Vitascope copied by Lubin, were first

exhibited in Japan in the latter half of 1896. By the autumn of 1897, the British motion

picture camera, the Baxter and Wray Cinematograph, was imported by Konishi

Photographic Store. Using these imported cameras, the first cameramen, such as Shiro

Asano, Tsunekichi Shibata, and Kanzo Shirai, filmed street scenes and geisha dances, and,

as early as 1898-9, were making skit films exploiting trick effects, like Bake Jizo ('Jizo

the spook', 1898) and Shinin no sosei ('The resurrection of a corpse', 1898). However, by

the turn of the century there was still no established film industry in Japan, and French,

American, and British films dominated the Japanese market.

Following the tradition of the magic lantern show, or utsushie, early films were shown at

variety halls, rental halls, or ordinary theatres, alongside presentations in different media.

Many of the first Japanese films recorded scenes from kabuki: in 1899, Momijigari

('Viewing scarlet maple leaves') and Ninin Dojoji ('Two people at Dojo temple') were

filmed by Tsunekichi Shibata, and Tsuneji Tsuchiya made Nio no ukisu ('The floating nest

of the little grebe'). Momijigari, a film of the kabuki play, featuring the legendary actors

Danjuro Ichikawa IX and Kikugoro Onoe V, consisted of three shots and already showed

a primitive form of film narrativity. Ninin Dojoji was the first tinted film ever made in

Japan. It was coloured by the Yoshizawa Company, manufacturers of magic lantern

apparatus and slides, who later became one of the first Japanese film production

companies. When Ninin Dojoji was projected at the kabuki theatre in August 1900, the

sponsor created a mock-up of a valley in front of the screen, with a fishfilled pond

between the rocks, and a cool breeze generated by an electric fan wafting over the

audience. Such extrafilmic devices were an important feature of early Japanese cinema.

In addition to the Konishi Photographic Store, Asanuma & Co. and Tsurubuchi

Photographic Store dabbled with film production at the turn of the century, but soon

turned exclusively to the sale of film stock and equipment. Japanese audiences were

hungry for domestic subjects, but even as late as 1904 there were no production

companies to fulfil their needs. The Komatsu Company, established in 1903, made some

subjects for travelling exhibitions in the provinces, but even Yoshizawa Company, the

most active, filmed only news subjects, landscapes, and geisha dances, and foreign films,

especially from France, still dominated the market.

It was the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 that vitalized domestic production.

A number of journalists and cameramen were sent to the Asian mainland to report on the

war, among them motion picture cameramen Tsunekichi Shibata and Kozaburo Fujiwara,

whose war films, along with those shot by British cameramen, became extremely popular

in Japan. The popularity of war films led to the production of Japanese-made fake

documentaries, and, in a similar vein, in 1905-6 a number of French 'reproduction of war'

films were released. These fake documentaries of the Russo-Japanese War drew

audiences' attention to the differences between fiction and non-fiction films, a distinction

that had not been visible in the Japanese film industry up until that point.

Until 1908 there was no film studio in Japan, and all films were shot in the open air,

including the kabuki films that required painted backdrops. However, after visiting the

Edison studio in the USA, Kenichi Kawaura, the head of Yoshizawa Company, built a

glass studio in Meguro, Tokyo, completed in January 1908. Soon afterwards, Pathé built a

film studio in Okubo, Tokyo, the Yokota Company followed suit in Kyoto, and a year

later the Fukuhodo Company started film-making in the Hanamidera studio, also in

Tokyo. From 1909, then, systematic film-making, particularly of fiction films, could

begin, and these four companies formed the mainstream of that production in the early

years.

In October 1903 Japan's first cinema (Denki-kan or Electric Theatre) was established in

Asakusa, Tokyo, and from this point the number of cinemas gradually increased, slowly

replacing the vaudeville halls. The Japanese developed a unique way of showing films,

borrowed from the traditions of the staged kabuki and Noh, which lasted throughout the

silent period; a benshi, who explained the filmic image to the audiences, attended each

performance. In the primitive era they introduced the films and told their outlines to the

audience before the show began. But, as the films became longer and increasingly

complex, the benshi explained the scenes and spoke the dialogue, accompanied by

Japanese music, while the silent images flickered on the screen. The system of one or

sometimes several players narrating from outside the filmic image prevented Japanese

cinema's complete assimilation to the western form of film practice. The narrative

function of the intertitles and the shot organization tended to be simplified as much as

possible to emphasize the skill of the benshi in describing the narrative development of

the film, the meaning of the scene, the atmosphere, and the feelings of the characters.

There were few intertitles in Japanese films even in the late 1910s, and in most cases they

functioned only as captions to each chapter of the story. Similarly, the dominance of the

benshi's voice obliged the exclusion of the short take and any rapid action by the actors.

By the 1910s, the popularity of the benshi became so enormous that they exerted as much

power over the finished look of a film as any of the production companies, if not more.

This is not to say, however, that Japanese films did not adopt any western influences. By

1912, inspired by the French films that flooded the domestic market, the powerful

Yoshizawa Company was making dramas with contemporary subjects (known as Shinpa),

and filming in diverse genres such as comedy, trick film, scenery, and travelogue,

alongside more traditional kabuki. However, similarities with western cinema were

superficial, and Japanese films preserved a unique flavour throughout the 1910s. The

existence of the benshi as a narrator 'outside' the film meant that the primary purpose of

the mise-enscène of Japanese cinema was representing the characters' interactions and

changes of feeling and mood within each scene, rather than constructing an illusion of a

smoothly developing story. There were some, however, who did attempt to assimilate

western filmic forms into early Japanese film; Shin hototogisu ('The cuckoo-new form',

Pathé, 1909), directed by Shisetsu Iwafuji, used flashbacks, and Matsu no midori ('The

green of the pine', Yoshizawa, 1911) used a film-within-a-film as the climax of the

narrative. Even these works, however, adopted the traditional theatrical rule that the

female role was to be played by an oyama, the special male actor who always played the

women's roles. Until the early 1920s, there were very few actresses in Japanese cinema,

because it was believed that femininity could be rendered more effectively by an oyama

than by a real woman.

In 1912, aiming to monopolize the market, Yoshizawa, Yokota, Pathé, and Fukuhodo

consolidated into the trust Nippon Katsudoshashin Co. (Nikkatsu). This company built the

Mukojima studio in Tokyo, where they produced scores of Shinpa (New School) films.

These dealt with contemporary subjects, often adapted from newspaper serials or foreign

fiction, in a melodramatic style. In Kyoto they used the former Yokota studio, and

produced Kyuha (Old School) films; samurai films with historical backgrounds. As soon

as Nikkatsu was established, several anti-trust companies were also ' formed. Among

them, Tenkatsu, established in March 1914, became the most competitive rival to

Nikkatsu. Before being absorbed into Nikkatsu, Fukuhodo had bought the rights to

Charles Urban's Kinemacolor for the purpose of releasing Urban's Kinemacolor films and

producing Japanese films shot by the process. Taking over these rights, Tenkatsu was

established to make Kinemacolor films to compete with Nikkatsu films. Tenkatsu, who

imitated Nikkatsu by making both Old School and New School films, also produced

rensageki, or chain drama, a combination of stage play and cinema using films for the

scenes that were difficult to represent live on the stage. The live action and filmic images

alternated in a 'chain' fashion. After one scene was played by actors on the stage, the

screen descended and the next scene was projected on to it for several minutes, and then

the actors played on the stage again. Tenkatsu was unusual in employing actresses for

these films as early as 1914.

The distinction between the Old School and New School was borrowed from the concept

of genre chiefly established in stage plays of the Meiji period. The Old School, which was

later called jidaigeki (period drama), was constituted, in most cases, by sword-play films

in which people in historical costume appeared, set in the periods before the Meiji

restoration. The New School, which was later called gendaigeki (modern drama),

consisted of films set in contemporary circumstances. The Old School was always based

around a superstar: Matsunosuke Onoe was Nikkatsu's most famous star, while Tenkatsu

had the very popular Shirogoro Sawamura. The cinema of stars was thus established first

and foremost by the period drama in Japan. In such films, stereotyped stories were

repeated again and again, and played by the same actors. This tradition of repetition

became one of the most particular traits in the history of Japanese cinema. Such stories as

Chushingura ('The loyal forty-seven retainers') have been made many times and continue

to be made to this day.

By 1914 there were nine film-producing companies in Japan. The largest one was

Nikkatsu, which released fourteen films a month from their two studios. Tenkatsu had

studios in Tokyo and Osaka and made fifteen films a month. The oldest company,

Komatsu, established in 1903, had ceased film production for a while, but began to

produce films again in a studio in Tokyo in 1913. In 1914 this company made six films a

month. The ephemeral company Nippon Kinetophone made a few sound films in the

same year. Tokyo Cinema and Tsurubuchi Lantern & Cinematograph were making news

films. In Osaka, there were some small companies like Shikishima Film, Sugimoto Film,

and Yamato On-ei. By 1915, when M. Kashii Film, the company that took over Pathé,

joined these antitrust companies, Nikkatsu's aspirations to monopolize the market were

dashed.

Masao Inoue's Taii no musume ('The daughter of the lieutenant', 1917), made at the newly

established Kobayashi Co., was quite different from the traditional New School films in

using westernized techniques. Adapted from the German film Gendarm Möbius ( Stellan

Rye, 1913), Taii no musume was inspired by its stylistically static direction, but Masao

Inoue used a flashback that the German film had not, and utilized close-ups that were

unusual in Japanese cinema at the time. In the period when the filmic was for the most

part constituted as a kind of illustration for the benshi's vocal skills, Inoue showed the

rhetorical sense in the picture itself. The image of the bride's trousseau being carried for

the wedding ceremony is reflected on the surface of a river, while the camera pans slowly

to catch the faces of people in the frame. Such westernized direction was rare in Japanese

cinema even in 1917. Inoue again used close-ups in his next film Dokuso ("The

poisonous herb', 1917), but in most Japanese films of this period, where oyama still

played the female roles, the close-up of the 'woman' was not effective.

There had been partial and sporadic attempts to westernize Japanese cinema even before

1910. For example, in the Yoshizawa Company's comedy films, which were heavily

influenced by French cinema, the main actor was a Max Linder imitator. But it was in the

late 1910s that some companies attempted to change the highly codified organization of

primitive Japanese cinema into the constitution of westernized reality; incorporating

realist settings, rapid shot development, and a move away from stereotyped subjects. This

was also the period when the role of director attained a new importance. In 1918 directors

like Eizo Tanaka and Tadashi Oguchi made changes to the dominant form of Nikkatsu's

New School films.

Although stereotypes could not be avoided totally in modern drama, films of the New

School did show more artistic ambition, particularly those produced in Nikkaten's.

Mukojima studio in the late 1910s. In Japanese arts in the post-Meiji period, artistic

ambition was widely considered to be a western concept, so that the value of art in Japan

could be made highbrow by conforming to the norms of western art. The westernization

of style was easier in modern drama than in period drama, and so it was here that the

developments took place.

The process of westernization in Japanese cinema, which included the phasing out of

oyama in favour of actresses, began in earnest in the late 1910s, spearheaded by the ideas

of the young critic and film-maker Norimasa Kaeriyama. Kaeriyama asserted that

Japanese cinema, which was only the illustration of the benshi's voice impersonations,

had to find a way for the narrative to be automatically formed by the filmic image, as seen

in the dominant form of European and American cinema. In 1918, when Nikkatsu allowed

Eizo Tanaka and Tadashi Oguchi to make westernized films on this principle, Tenkatsu,

accepting Kaeriyama's idea of the 'pure film drama', gave him the opportunity to make

two films: Sei no kagayaki ('The glow of life') and Miyama no otome ('Maid of the

deepmountains', both 1918). These films were set in imaginary westernized

circumstances, avoiding the highly codified comportment of the actors employed in

traditional Japanese cinema, and manufacturing naturalism that was complete opposition

to the prevalent Japanese style. They were the first Japanese films actively, if very

naïvely, to adopt western concepts of art.

Slowly other film companies took up this trend, and by the early 1920s the traditional

form of Japanese cinema had become completely old-fashioned. The period between 1920

and the first half of 1923 (just before the Great Kanto Earthquake) witnessed a change of

form in Japanese cinema. The New School became established as modern drama, and the

Old School as the period drama. There was a transition from the traditional theatrical

form to the studio system, and film style, as well as the production process, began to

follow the western model. The earliest form of Japanese cinema, which avoided rapid

changes of images, used intertitles only for the chapters of a story, or used filmic images

for discrete segments of a stage play as seen in the chain drama, was obliged to change in

this period, even within the most conservative companies, like Nikkatsu. The company

resisted assimilating to the western form for a long time and attempted to preserve

tradition, but finally the audience's changing demands prompted change in company

policy.

In this short period, two ephemeral companies made some interesting films. One of the

two was Kokkatsu, which absorbed Tenkatsu in 1920, and gave Norimasa Kaeriyama the

opportunity to make films. This company not only produced period dramas directed by

Jiro Yoshino, but also began actively employing actresses in the place of oyama. It

allowed some directors to experiment with making realist films, such as Kantsubaki

('Winter camellia', Ryoha Hatanaka, 1921), or films which partially employed

expressionist settings, for example Reiko no wakare ('On the verge of spiritual light',

Kiyomatsu Hosoyama, 1922).

Eizo Tanaka's Kyoyo erimise ('Kyoka, the collar shop', 1922), one of the last Japanese

films to feature oyama (male actors in female roles)

The Taikatsu Company was established to produce intellectual films. This company did

not, unlike Nikkatsu and Kokkatsu, draw the audience in by making Old School sword-

play films with popular stars, and neither was the company interested in the already

codified form of New School films. Taikatsu's intention was to produce cinematic

Japanese films inspired by, but not directly imitating, European and American cinema.

For this purpose, the company invited Junichiro Tanizaki to be their adviser. Their first

production was The Amateur Club ( Kisaburo Kuri hara , 1920), in which elements of

American cinema -bathing beauties, chase scenes, slapstick-were adapted to Japanese

circumstances, attaining a visual dynamism absent from other traditional Japanese films

of the time. This was one of the first Americanized films produced in Japan, and its

director, Kurihara, went on to make Katsushika sunago ( 1921), Hinamatsuri no yoru

('The night of the dolls' festival', 1921), and Jyasei no in ('The lasciviousness of the viper',

1921) at Taikatsu, and expand this aesthetic.

The early 1920s also saw the establishment of Shochiku Kinema, a company which

relinquished archaic filmmaking from the outset, and introduced American formulas in

film direction. Shochiku used actresses who adopted facial expressions found in

American films in order to represent psychological complexity, and tried to render the

more natural movement of the everyday world. Shochiku built a studio in Kamata, Tokyo,

and immediately began to produce Americanized films under the advice of George

Chapman and Henry Kotani from Hollywood studios. The tendency to represent the naïve

imaginary world, as seen in the works of Kaeriyama, and a blatant desire to rebuff the

traditional Japanese style, were the hallmarks of the Shochiku films. The forthright

Americanism of the studio was decried by critics at first, but such criticism ceased in the

mid-1920s, when Japanese cinema as a whole assimilated a studio system based on the

model of the United States.

In 1920 such American methods in Japanese filmmaking would still have seemed strange

to the audiences, but the situation changed rapidly, and the system was transformed

virtually within a year. At Shochiku, Kaoru Osanai, the innovator of the theatre world,

turned to filmmaking, supervising the revolutionary Rojo no reikon ('Soul on the road',

Minoru Murata, 1921), the very apotheosis of the studio's desire to produce a new

Japanese aesthetic. In this film, plural stories were narrated in parallel, a new practice,

inspired by D. W. Griffith's Intolerance ( 1916). By this time even Nikkatsu, which had

been making the most traditional films, could not resist the current. In January 1921 the

company founded a special section for 'intellectual' film-making, dominated by the

director Eizo Tanaka, who made three films that year: Asahi sasu mae ('Before the

morning sun shines'), Shirayuri no kaori ('Scent of the white lily'), and Nagareyuku onna

('Woman in the stream'). These were, for Nikkatsu, attempts at innovation. They were

released in theatres that specialized in screening foreign films to an intellectual audience.

Their intertitles were written in both Japanese and English. The New School films

employed several benshi and the intertitles were traditionally felt to disturb the flow of

the filmic image. However, foreign films were narrated by a solitary benshi, so Nikkatsu

inserted bilingual intertitles into these 'intellectual' films to avoid the resistance of the

traditional film fans and to establish an affinity with the similarly titled foreign films.

Nevertheless, as the acting style in these films remained traditional, the attempts at

innovation were not wholly successful, especially in the face of competition from

Shochiku. Although Tanaka's films did feature actresses, in the main Nikkatsu, the last

film company to give up the oyama, continued to make films with them up until 1923.

So, despite this general shift towards westernized cinematic styles, traditional Japanese

forms were not totally abandoned. Indeed in 1922 Eizo Tanaka made the masterpiece

Kyoya erimise ('Kyoya, the collar shop') employing oyama. Unlike the contemporary

directors at Shochiku, Tanaka did not simply follow American cinematic trends. This was

a film about an old collar shop, Kyoya, in which the downfall of one family, and, by

implication, of old Japan, is described through the passing of the four seasons. The

distinction of the seasons in this film corresponds to seasonal words in haiku, traditional

Japanese poetry, which, added to the poetic background and atmosphere of downtown

Tokyo, made this the most refined form of Japanese traditional art achieved by the cinema

to date. As one of the last Nikkatsu films that employed oyama, Kyoya erimise was the

final swan-song of archaism in the vanishing old style of Japanese cinema. Without

demolishing the concepts of conservative film, Nikkatsu was able to preserve the pure

Japanese plastic beauty in this masterpiece. For the film, Tanaka constructed the Kyoya

shop in its entirety in the Mukojima studio. The partition walls could be removed

according to the camera position, and for natural representation of actors' movement from

room to room and from the verandah to the garden.

After this, Nikkatsu was to make a series of high-quality films, before the Great Kanto

Earthquake of September 1923. Tanaka made Dokuro no mai ('Dance of the skull', 1923),

using actors and actresses who belonged to the Association of Stage Players. It was a

portrayal of the asceticism of a Buddhist priest and, at eleven reels, was highly ambitious.

Critics compared it to classic foreign works, in particular Stroheim's Foolish Wives

( 1922). Japanese films were finally being received on the same level as foreign,

especially American, films.

Together with Tanaka, Kensaku Suzuki was the first auteur in the history of Japanese

cinema. In addition to these two, younger directors emerged in this period, like Osamu

Wakayama and, youngest of all, Kenji Mizoguchi, Tanaka's protégé and assistant on

Kyoya Erimise. Some of the most important achievements in Japanese film are found in

the works of Suzuki. In a short period of activity, he realized a film form akin to the

European avant-garde, and anticipated a wholly new trend of film-making that would

arise suddenly in the aftermath of the Earthquake. The extremely pessimistic style and

content of his films were feverishly applauded by the young audience of the time. Tabi no

onna geinin ('The itinerant female artiste', 1923) portrays the parallel lives of two

desperate souls, a man and a woman who only meet by chance in the final scene to part

again and go on their gloomy ways. In the Stroheimian Aiyoku no nayami (Agony of

lust', 1923) an old man is tragically besotted with a younger woman. The bleakest realism

came in Ningen-ku ('Anguish of a human being', 1923), in which Suzuki rejected

conventional narrativity, and demonstrated his ideology of pessimism in a new form. The

first reel of this four-reel film shows the fragmented existences of various assorted low-

life characters: a starved old man, a group of tramps, bad boys, and prostitutes. The lives

of these poor and ill-fated people is paralleled by the glittering images of an aristocratic

ball. Following this, a poor man sneaks into the home of a rich man and witnesses the

master of the house, who is bankrupt, committing suicide after killing his wife. The film

depicts events from about 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., so that all the scenes are shot at night, with a

grim mise-en-scène of rainy streets, gas lamps, flowing muddy water, and dilapidated

buildings. Suzuki, insisting on extreme realism, made the actor who played the 'shadowy

old man' fast for three days. Other innovations in Ningen-ku include frequent close-ups,

dialogue intertitles, and, notably, rapid editing that was not to be the norm in Japan until

the late 1920s.

By 1923 Japanese cinema had virtually demolished the long-standing traditional form, on

the one hand by assimilating American cinema, and on the other through the inspiration of

avant-garde film forms such as German Expressionism and French Impressionism.

Nevertheless, Japanese cinema had not only assimilated and imitated. For example, the

point-of-view shot was extremely scarce in Japanese cinema even in the mid-1920s. This

resulted from the fact that Japanese cinema depended on the force of narrative illusionism

constituted by the voice of the benshi, and from the long-standing tradition of the distance

kept between the object and the lens of the camera. The archaic form of Japanese art and

culture still exerted influence on Japanese cinema beyond the early period.

Bibliography

Anderson, Joseph L., and Richie, Donald ( 1982), The Japanese Film: Art and Industry.

Burch, Noël ( 1979), To the Distant Observer.

Nolletti, Arthur, Jr., and Desser, David (eds.) ( 1992), Reframing Japanese Cinema:

Authorship, Genre and History.

Sato, Tadao, et al. (eds.) ( 1986), Koza Nihon Eiga, i and ii.

Tanaka, Junichiro ( 1975), Nihon Eiga Hattatsu Shi, i and ii.

Daisuke Ito (1898-1981)

A short from Daisuke Ito's recently redisovered masterpiece Chuji tabi nikki (' A diary of

Chuji's travels', 1927)

Largely forgotten today, Daisuke Ito was regarded in the late 1920s and early 1930s, by

Japanese audiences and critics alike, as one of Japan's foremost directors. Most of his

films from that period are unfortunately now lost, and, except for a few fragments and the

miraculously surviving Oatsurae Jirokichi goshi ('The chivalrous robber Jirokichi', 1931),

all his silent films were known after the war only by repute. But in December 1991 his

most famous silent film was rediscovered, and some of the second part and most of the

third part of the great trilogy Chuji tabi nikki ('A diary of Chuji's travels', 1927) became

available for modern audiences to enjoy.

Ito made his first film in 1924 and thereafter worked consistently as a director until 1970.

But it is on his silent films that his reputation is founded, and except for one or two works

such as Oosho ('The chess king', 1948) his sound films, particularly post-war, have been

undervalused. The main reason for this is that critics have tended to judge them (rather as

happened in the case of Abel Grance in France) against a fading memory of his innovative

silent style. The energetic style of his late 1920s films was indeed unique in the world.

The camera roamed in every direction, samurai dashed across the screen, a row of

lanterns swirled around in the deep dark of night, and the rhythm of the films reached

vertiginous speeds through accelerated montage. Intertitles that stressed the dialogue were

synchronized to the rhythm of the images, and the rhythm of the words was inspired by

Japanese poetry and other forms of story-telling.

Above all, a spirit of Romanticism, sentimentalism, nihilism, and a despairing rebellion

against power penetrated all of Ito's films of the period. He raised the jidaigeki (period

drama) to the level of avant-garde cinema, even competing with the so-called tendency

film (expressing proletarian ideology). Some of his jidaigeki borrowed materials from

German or French novels. Elsewhere, he repeatedly tried to break out of the established

formula for jidaigeki films, including an attempt to conjure up images inspired by

Chopin's music in Ikiryo ('Evil spirit', 1927). In the early 1930s, like Alfred Hitchcock, he

experimented with sound. In his first sound film, Tangesazen ( 1933), he deliberately

restricted the use of dialogue and sound, and he used Schubert's Unfinished Symphony in

a jidaigeki - Chusingura ('The loyal forty-seven Ronin', 1934).

Ito always saw himself as an artisan, and his work of the sound period contains its fair

share of mediocre entertainment films made to the orders of producers. His wartime work,

such as Kurama Tengu ( 1942) or Kokusai mitsuyudan ('International smugglers', 1944),

provided an escape from the reality of war as well as from the propaganda film.

He returned to the front rank of Japanese cinema in 1948 with the highly acclaimed

Oosho, but apart from a few films, such as Hangyakuji ('The conspirator', 1961), his post-

war work remains largely unrecognized. Among his lesser-known films Yama wo tobu

hanagasa ('The hat adorned with flowers flying over the mountain', 1949) is undoubtedly,

from a modern standpoint, a masterpiece, as is Harukanari haha no kuni ('The motherland

far far away', 1950), with its contrapuntal editing of image and sound and use of

metaphorical montage.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Ito made many jidaigeki, and came to be regarded as a

director of a single genre of film. His early career as maker of highly prized silent films

became forgotten, as did the films themselves. But he is now beginning to be rediscovered

and valued, both for his masterly silent films and for the qualities of mise-en-scène in his

sound films.

HIROSHI KOMATSU SELECT FILMOGRAPHY

Jogashima ( 1924); Ikiryo ( 1927); Oatsurae Jirokichi goshi ( 1931); Tangesazen ( 1933);

Chusingura ( 1934); Kokusai mitsuyudan ( 1944); Oosho ( 1948); Yama wo tobu

hanagasa ( 1949); Harukanari haha no kuni ( 1950); Hangyakuji ( 1961)

THE SILENT CINEMA EXPERIENCE

Music and the Silent Film

MARTIN MARKSSilent films were a technological accident, not an aesthetic choice. If

Edison and other pioneers had had the means, music would probably have been an

integral part of filmmaking from the very start. But because such means were lacking, a

new type of theatrical music rapidly developed; the wide variety of films and screening

conditions in Europe or America between 1895 and the late 1920s came to be matched by

an equally wide range of musical practice and musical materials. With the coming of

synchronized sound this variety disappeared and a whole past experience was lost from

view. Since the 1980s, however, with the renewed interest in reviving silent performance,

film musicians and historians have begun to rediscover the field and even to find new

forms of accompaniment for silent film.

MUSICAL PRACTICE

Music in silent cinema has long been of interest to film theorists, and a number of

explanations have been proposed to account for its apparently indispensable presence

right from the start. These have tended to concentrate on the psycho-acoustic functions of

music (well summarized by Gorbman 1987), and only recently have historians begun to

pay close attention to the theatrical context of film presentations and in particular to the

debt owed by film music to long-standing traditions of music for the theatre, adapted as

necessary to suit the new medium.Consider, for example, the remarkable variety and

richness of so-called 'incidental' music for stage plays throughout the nineteenth century

(a variety that becomes still richer if one looks further to the past). At one end, lavish

incidental works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bizet, and Grieg, though somewhat

atypical, proved highly useful for film accompaniment -- or so we can presume, since

excerpts from these works were repeatedly published in film music anthologies and

inserted into compiled scores (often for scenes quite unlike their original contexts). But

most theatre music was the work of minor figures, who, like their successors in the field

of film music, continually had to compose, arrange, conduct, or improvise functional bits

and pieces -- 'mélodrames', 'hurries', 'agits', and so on-on the spur of the moment, for one

ephemeral production after another.Relatively little of this music is known today, but what

has been seen (like the collection of Victorian-period examples published by Mayer and

Scott) bears a strong family likeness to the seemingly 'new' music later published in film

anthologies. Thus, the practitioners of incidental music supplied a triple legacy -- of pre-

existent repertoire, stylistic prototypes, and working methods -just as did those who

specialized in the genres of ballet and pantomime. The latter genres sometimes came very

close to anticipating the peculiar requirements of scores for silent films, owing to their

absence of speech and need for continuous music, some of it consisting of closed forms

suitable for patterned choreography, some of it open-ended and fragmentary, intended to

mirror the smallest details of stage action.Paradoxically, the theatrical genre with perhaps

the most powerful influence on film music was the one with which its affinity was the

weakest, namely opera. Instrumental arrangements from many hundreds of popular works

(Italian, French, German, English) were called for in silent-film cue sheets of the 1910s

and 1920s; moreover, by that time Wagner's development of a symphonic approach (the

orchestra supplying a continuous commentary), characterized by the use of symbolic

themes, long-range thematic transformations, opulent tone colours, and romantic

harmonies, was so much admired that many leading composers of film scores (including

Joseph Carl Breil, Gottfried Huppertz, and Mortimer Wilson, all discussed below) either

explicitly acknowledged his influence or implicitly imitated his style, albeit with less than

Wagnerian results.As was true of film music's antecedents, accompaniments to silent

films were of many types, so the popular image of the lone pianist improvising (badly, on

an out-oftune relic) to whatever appeared on the screen is only the smallest and darkest

part of a much broader and brighter panorama. All told, musical ensembles fell into four

distinct categories, determined largely by the time period and theatrical milieu.

1.

Viudeville/music hall orchestras accompanied films when seen as part of variety

shows during the early years (mid- 1890s into the early 1900s), and there is considerable

evidence to suggest that the music played during such presentations was as carefully

prepared as it was for all other portions of the show.

2.

When films moved into theatres of their own (nickelodeons, etc., beginning c.

1905), music came with them, principally on pianos or mechanical equivalents. This

phase marks the beginning of film music as a distinct profession, but for a time many

theatre owners neglected the musical end of their operations: some of these pianos were

out of tune, some of the performers quite unskilled. Still, the trade periodicals regularly

mentioned certain theatres featuring music to praise rather than blame; and the

importance of music even in these modest arenas is further attested by the widespread

custom of enhancing programmes with 'illustrated songs' (as in small-time vaudeville

houses).

3.

From about 1910 theatres tended to be built larger, with more impressive facilities

and increased budgets for music: chamber ensembles of anything from three players

(comprising a melody instrument, piano, and drums) to fifteen became common. This

development coincided with radical changes in film production and distribution, as well

as the length and nature of individual films, and led to a growing market for musical

arrangements suitable for film-playing. From 1910 onwards, therefore, there was a great

flowering of film music publications, which continued until the end of the period.

4.

The final phase is that of the grand movie 'palaces', built during the late 1910s and

1920s. There one heard spectacular theatre organs (the earliest models date from about

1912, but they became far more impressive a decade later), sharing the spotlight with

large orchestras and colourful conductors some of whom ( William Axt, Giuseppe Becce,

Carli Elinor, Louis Levy, Hans May, Erno Rapée, Hugo Riesenfeld, Marc Roland, and

others) also became prominent as film composers. At least one such palace could be

found in every town of even moderate size, while metropolitan centres like New York,

London, and Berlin boasted several. The shows became lavish, mingling concert

overtures, vaudeville stars, classical performers, and skits intended as prologues to the

actual films, and these too comprised a rich array, from cartoon and travelogue to the

main feature.

Of course accompaniments were as diverse as the musicians who played them, but

circumstances pressed toward the middle of the spectrum-between improvisation at one

end and full original scores at the other. A keyboard soloist can improvise and play with

expressive subtleties of rhythm not possible for an ensemble, but the quality of

improvisation is apt to flag, the soloist's store of ideas exhausted, when playing for new

films day after day. (Moreover, as witnesses attest, improvisation can be dangerous when

you do not know what is coming next in the film.) On the other hand, complete original

scores were simply not practical or feasible: there were special cases from the very

earliest years, but most films were too short-lived, the distribution system too far-flung,

and performers too varied in ensemble and too uneven in talent to justify commissioned

scores.Since most soloists and all ensembles needed something written out to play, the

practical solution was to rely on compiled/composed mixtures of music, much of it ready-

made or familiar to the performers. Compiled scores for feature films thus became the

great tradition of film music, especially after the appearance of Breil's landmark score for

The Birth of a Nation in 1915. The Breil score, after first being played by orchestras on

tour with the film, was made available to theatres in printed copies, and the policy of

'publication' of a score for distribution with its film was adopted for many subsequent

important American films. Scores survive for many of these films, including: The Battle

Cry of Peace ( J. Stuart Blackton, 1915; S. L. Rothapfel , with Ivan Rudisill and S. M.

Berg), Joan the Woman ( Cecil B. DeMille, 1916; William Furst), Civilization ( Thomas

Ince, 1917; Victor Schertzinger), Where the Pavement Ends (Rex Ingram, 1922; Luz),

The Big Parade (Vidor, 1925; Axt and David Mendoza), Beau Geste ( Herbert Brenon,

1926; Riesenfeld), Wings ( William Wellman, 1927; J. S. Zamecnik); and four films by D.

W. Griffith: Hearts of the World ( 1917, Elinor), The Greatest Question ( 1919, Pesce),

Broken Blossoms ( 1919, Louis Gottschalk), Way down East ( 1920, Louis Silvers and

William F. Peters). Griffith in fact commissioned scores for almost all of his silent

features from The Birth of a Nation on (so long as his finances allowed), but few

Hollywood directors or producers showed a similar interest in music. The majority of

feature films were not supplied with scores for distribution; instead performers were left

to devise accompaniments of their own, aided by cue sheets, anthologies, and catalogues.

MUSICAL MATERIALS

The first and most succinct aids for performers were what came to be called cue sheets:

that is, brief lists of specific pieces and/or types of music to accompany particular films,

with cues and supplementary instructions. At first these lists were relatively crude and

perhaps not all that reliable, but like other aids they became steadily more apt,

sophisticated, and commercially valuable during the second half of the silent period,

reflecting changes in cinema itself. It is interesting to compare the anonymous cue sheet

for the Edison Company's one-reel Frankenstein ( 1910) and the "Thematic Music Cue

Sheet" prepared by James C. Bradford for Paul Leni's popular feature The Cat and the

Canary ( 1927). The former is a typical specimen from the pioneering series published

between 1909 and 1912 in the American edition of the Edison Kinetogram and offers

merely the barest outline of an accompaniment, comprising fourteen cues beginning as

follows:

At opening: Andante -- 'Then You'll Remember Me'

Till Frankenstein's laboratory: Moderato -- 'Melody in F'

Till monster is forming: Increasing agitato

Till monster appears over bed: Dramatic music from Der Freischütz

Till father and girl in sitting room: Moderato

Till Frankenstein returns home: 'Annie Laurie' [etc.]

In sharp contrast, the Canary cue sheet was issued as a lavish eight-page brochure in a

coloured cover (apparently an exceptional format), and spells out sixty-six explicit cues,

using three dozen pieces by more than two dozen composers. It also contains, on the front

and back covers, detailed description of the score's recurring themes, together with useful

'suggestions for playing', cue by cue.

The differences are significant, but there is one key point of resemblance: both lists

feature monuments of nineteenth-century repertoire for crucial scenes. In Frankenstein,

'dramatic music' from Weber's Freischütz is called for five times (vague cues indeed,

probably indicating eerie excerpts from the Overture or the ' Wolf's Glen Scene', to be

performed ad lib), whenever the monster appears; in Canary, the beginning of Schubert's

"Unfinished" Symphony appears four times and is identified as the 'Mammy Theme'. (The

music, according to Bradford, indicates 'the uncertainty and questionable position of this

woman who is distrusted'.) Both scores also mix their classical fragments with morsels in

varied lighter styles: Frankenstein includes a sentimental salon piece and an old-fashioned

parlour song ( Rubinstein's "Melody in F", Annie Laurie); Canary brings together many

comic misteriosos and up-todate popular numbers, all suitable for the film's tongue-

incheek tone. Such jumbles were the norm (though Bradford claims that his suggested

music offers 'a perfect sequence of modulations from one selection to another'), because

they were seen as the most appropriate way to follow the films; and one finds the same

sort of odd but functionally efficient hodge-podge within the period's anthologies and

catalogues.

By the 1920s, the latter materials had become just as elaborate as cue sheets (which, as in

the Bradford example, drew from them extensively for repertoire), after similarly modest

beginnings. Early anthologies were made up of not-too-difficult piano pieces usually

running to no more than a single page, as in Zamecnik's collections of Sam Fox Moving

Picture Music (seventy original pieces in three volumes, 1913-14; a fourth volume

appeared in 1923) and the Witmark Moving Picture Album (an in-house compilation of

101 pieces which had been previously published, 1913). The range of categories was hit

or miss, though there was a recurrent emphasis on music for 'national scenes' and ethnic

groups (especially patriotic songs and exotic pieces of 'Indian' or 'Oriental' music), along

with basic moods (comic, mysterious, pathetic, etc.) and types of action (funeral, hurry,

storm, wedding, etc.). Later anthologies were intended to be more comprehensive and

systematic. For example, all but two of the fourteen volumes of the Hawkes Photo-Play

Series ( 1922-7) contained half a dozen expansive pieces, each by a different English

composer; and, as was then typical, each volume could be obtained in a piano album

and/or in arrangements for small or full orchestra.The most impressive single book of

piano music, however, was Erno Rapée's Motion Picture Moods ( 1924), which contained

370 pieces, many of them of great difficulty, indexed under fifty-three headings. In a

unique format these headings are listed alphabetically on the margin of every page to

facilitate 'rapid reference', but the contents of the book are really too vast for such an

index to do more than steer pianists in the right direction. The group of 'National' pieces

alone extends over 150 pages, beginning with the USA (for which there is the lengthiest

subsection, including patriotic hymns, college songs, and Christmas carols), and then

proceeding alphabetically from Argentina to Wales, with a huge assortment of anthems,

dances, and traditional songs. Rapée followed this the next year with an Encyclopedia of

Music for Pictures aimed at directors of ensembles: the book offered more than 5,000

titles of published arrangements under 500 headings, plus a great deal of space for

additional numbers to be added to the lists, allowing for each theatre to build its own

customized music library. (In recent years, some of these libraries -- for example the

Balaban & Katz collection in Chicago and the Paramount library in Oakland-have turned

up virtually intact, and while each is organized differently, all tend to follow a system

similar to Rapée's.) As a compendium of repertoire, the Encyclopedia was superseded

only by the thematic index in Hans Erdmann and Giuseppe Becce's two-volume

Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik ( 1927), one of the period's last and most

valuable sources.By the mid- 1920s, then, the spectrum of film music publications

encompassed tens of thousands of pieces, some of them arrangements of pre-existent

material, some newly composed for film accompaniment, and some nominally new but

clearly based on existing themes. New or old, the music was then indexed according to

the purpose it could serve in film accompaniment. It would seem that almost any piece

was suitable for more than one context, or at least could be rendered so by changing the

style of performance, no matter how it was marked. Rapée's anthology contains an item

called 'Agitato No. 3', by Otto Langey, whose first strain is obviously modelled on Schu

bert 's "Erlkönig", and the piece is described as 'suitable for gruesome or infernal scenes,

witches, etc.'. But Rapée indexes it under 'Battle', and elsewhere in the anthology, even

more confusingly, the actual beginning of Schubert's own song is categorized as a

'misterioso' (despite its tempo marking of 'presto'). The more the repertory grew,

therefore, the more it seems to have fundamentally stayed the same, dictated by functional

requirements. Most pieces were expected to communicate their essential messages within

the space of a few bars, and often had to be broken off for the next cue. (In Bradford's list,

the shortest items are timed at thirty seconds, the longest three minutes.) Under the

circumstances, too much stylistic variety was suspect, but clich+00E9s were not (and they

made the music easier to play); moreover, familiar music (like the text that sometimes

went with it) might be valued highly for its allusive power, even if the reference was

imprecise.Similar considerations apply when evaluating compiled scores. As mixed in

their repertoire as cue sheets, many were stereotyped and seemingly haphazard, and all

were liable to be altered greatly from performance to performance. However, in several

cases both the selection and the synchronization of the music were carefully planned, and

led to results well above the norm. Three examples can serve to illustrate the range of

possibilities, as determined by types of films and circumstances of their

production/distribution.

1.

Walter C. Simon's music for the 1912 Kalem film The Confederate Ironclad: this

concise piano score, from an impressive series Simon created for Kalem in 1912 and

1913, was written for an advanced example of film narrative at that time. It fits the film

exceptionally well, and even though much of it is 'original', it is very much like a written

out cue-sheet score, with several pre-existent tunes.

2.

Breil's orchestral score for The Birth of a Nation can be seen as a Simon score writ

large, with the added interest of extensive original music involving more than a dozen key

leitmotivs, plus effective varieties of orchestral colour. By this time too, the repertoire has

been opened up to include a large number of nineteenth-century symphonic and operatic

works, more suitable for orchestral than piano accompaniments, and necessary for such a

film epic. There is no doubt that Griffith wanted music to be an integral part of the film

experience and, although the degree of his involvement cannot be known precisely, he

certainly played a role in encouraging Breil's ambitious efforts.

Mood music: an orchestra playing on the set to create the right atmosphere for a scene

from Warner Bros.' The Age of Innocence( 1924)

3.

The Axt-Mendoza score for Vidor's Big Parade follows the Breil model and is no

less a major piece of work, though with neither the same amount of original music nor the

personal stamp of the Griffith scores. Indeed, just as this later epic displays a smoother

style than Griffith's, the score shows how, by the mid-1920s, film music had Berlin, had

become a prime locale for the manufacture of scores, thanks to co-operative partnerships

between film producers, theatres, and music publishers.

Alongside compiled scores, original scores also increased in number in the 1920s, often

with remarkable results. A significant American example is Mortimer Wilson's music for

Raoul Walsh's 1924 The Thief of Bagdad: richly worked out in terms of both thematic

structure and orchestration, its lavish design is fitting for so opulent a film and presages

the achievements of Erich Korngold and the great composers of Hollywood scores in the

sound period. But the most impressive centres of original work were not in New York or

Hollywood, but in France, Germany, and Russia, where the fascination of artists and

intellectuals with the new medium led to unique collaborations.An important precedent

had been set in Europe much earlier, with Camille Saint-Saëns's score for the 1908film

d'art, L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise. As one might expect given the composer's many

years of experience and mastery of his craft, this score displays impressive thematic unity

and harmonic design, and is as polished as his many previous essays in ballet, pantomime,

and tone poem. Yet because it serves the film so well, the score has come to share the fate

of his other incidental pieces: mentioned in surveys but rarely studied, regarded more as a

fascinating transitional effort than as a convincing work of art.Of the many innovative

scores by composers who gravitated toward film in the 1920s, three in particular deserve

mention, each successful in attaining different goals.

1.

Eric Satie's score for Entr'acte ( 1924) shines as an antinarrative, proto-minimalist

gem; like Clair's film, it is designed both to dazzle and to disorient the audience, partly by

parodying the medium's customary product, partly by following a subtle formal logic

beneath a deceptively random surface.

2.

The Huppertz score for Metropolis ( 1927), commissioned for the Berlin premiére,

is one of the most peculiar examples known to survive of music following Wagner's

leitmotiv system, within an elaborate symphonic framework. Apparently following Lang's

original tripartite structure for the film, Huppertz divides his score into three independent

'movements' with the unusual names of 'Auftakt'. 'Zwischenspiel', and 'Furioso'. Like the

film, the music intermixes elements of nineteenthcentury melodrama and twentieth-

century modernism, and that is an essential part of its fascination: it strives

o

reinforce Lang's messages, and, while showing similarities to the American compilations

discussed above, employs a far more complex and varied musical vocabulary.

3.

Dmitri Shostakovich's score for Kozintsev and Trau berg 's New Babylon ( 1929)

ranks among the greatest examples of film music by a leading avant-garde composer of

any generation. Like the film, and somewhat like Satie's score for Entr'acte, the music is

in large part satirical, and depends for its effects on the distortion of well-known tunes,

especially the 'Marseillaise', as well as the use of French-style 'wrong-note' harmonies and

persistent motor rhythms -- all designed to offer both counterpoint and continuity to the

film's energetic montage. But the score (now available in a complete recording by the

Berlin Radio Symphony) also makes strong ideological points and attains tragic stature.

One great example occurs at the end of part vi, for scenes of the despair, desperate

resistance, and massacre of the Communards. While an old revolutionary pauses to play a

piano abandoned on the barricades, and while his comrades listen, visibly moved, the

orchestra pauses too, for the pit pianist's poignant fragment of 'source music'

( Tchaikovsky's Chanson triste); this trails off, and when the final battle begins, the

orchestra commences a prolonged agitato, which finally resolves into a thumpingly banal

waltz. Thus Shostakovich emphasizes the brutality of the French bourgeoisie, who are

seen applauding at Versailles, as if presiding over the scenes of carnage. No less pointed

is the music for the film's end, though it aims in an opposite direction: here Shostakovich

combines a noble horn theme for the Communards with the melody of the Internationale

in rough, dissonant counterpoint. The double purpose is to honour the martyrdom of the

film's heroes, and, more generally, to convey hope without clichéd sentiment. In a final

symbolic gesture, he ends the score virtually in mid-phrase, a fitting match to the film's

open-ended final three shots of the words 'Vive' | 'la' | 'Commune', seen scrawled as jagged

graffiti pointing dynamically past the edges of the frame.

Each of these three scores offers a unique solution to the challenging compositional

problems posed by an unusual film. Together, they crown the silent film's 'golden age',

and show that the medium had found ways to tap music's expressive potential to the

highest degree.

SILENT FILMS AND MUSIC TODAY

Even as Shostakovich completed his score, silent films were rapidly becoming obsolete. It

did not take long for many of the practices and materials of the period to be forgotten or

lost, but there have been efforts ever since to revive them. Cinematheques and other

venues where silent films continued to be screened went on providing piano

accompaniments, but often in a mode that was neither musically inspiring nor historically

accurate. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York between 1939 and 1967, however,

Arthur Kleiner maintained the tradition of using original accompaniments, availing

himself of the Museum's collection of rare scores; where scores were lacking, he and his

colleagues created scores of their own, which were reproduced in multiple copies and

rented out with the films.

In recent years scholarly work (particularly in the USA and Germany) has greatly

increased our knowledge of silent film music; archives and festivals (notably Pordenone

in Italy and Avignon in France) have provided new venues for the showing of silent films

with proper attention to the music; and conductors such as Gillian Anderson and Carl

Davis have created or re-created orchestral scores for major silent classics. This initially

specialist activity has spilled over into the commercial arena. In the early 1980s two

competing revivals of Abel Gance's Napoléon vied for public attention in a number of

major cities -- one, based on the restoration of the film by Kevin Brownlow and David

Gill, with a score composed and conducted by Carl Davis, and the other with a score

compiled and conducted by Carmine Coppola. Even wider diffusion has been given to

silent film music with the issue of videocassettes and laser discs of a wide range of silent

films, from Keystone Cops to Metropolis, all with musical accompaniment.

Both because of and despite these advances, however, the current state of music for silent

films is unsettled, with no consensus as to what the music should be like or how it should

be presented. (There was a lack of consensus during the silent period, too, but the

spectrum was not as broad as it is today.) Discounting the option of screening a film in

silence, an approach now generally held to be undesirable except in the very rare cases of

films designed to be shown that way, we can distinguish three basic modes of presentation

currently in use: (1) film screened in an auditorium with live accompaniment; (2) film,

video, or laser disc given a synchronized musical sound-track and screened in an

auditorium; (3) video or laser disc versions screened on television at home. Obviously, the

second and third modes, while more prevalent and feasible than the first, take us

increasingly further from the practices of the period. To show a silent film or its video

copy with a synchronized score on a sound-track is to alter fundamentally the nature of

the theatrical experience; indeed, once recorded, the music hardly seems 'theatrical' at all.

As for home viewing, whatever its advantages it forgoes theatricality to the point that any

type of continuous music, and especially thunderous orchestras and organs, can weigh

heavily on the viewer.

As for the scores themselves, they too can be divided into three basic types: (1) a score

that dates from the silent era, whether compiled or original (Anderson has made this type

of score her speciality); (2) a score newly created (and/or improvised) but intended to

sound like 'period' music -- the approach usually taken by Kleiner, by the organist

Gaylord Carter, and more recently by Carl Davis; (3) a new score which is deliberately

anachronistic in style, such as those created by Moroder for Metropolis in 1983, and by

Duhamel and Jansen for Intolerance in 1986. Thus, altogether there now exist nine

possible combinations of music and silent cinema (three modes of presentation, three

types of score), and all of them have yielded results both subtle and obtrusive, both

satisfying and offensive.

Particularly interesting in this respect are the cases where different versions have recently

been prepared of the same film. For Intolerance, for example, there now exist four

different versions. There is Anderson's, which is based on the Breil score and has been

performed in conjunction with a restoration of the film (by MOMA and the Library of

Congress) in a version as close as possible to that seen at the 1916 New York premiére.

There is a Brownlow-Gill restoration with Davis score, which has been screened both live

and on television. There is the 'modernist' Duhamel and Jansen version. And a laser disc

also exists of a further restoration with a recorded organ score by Carter. In the case of

Metropolis popular attention has been grabbed by the Moroder version with its synthetic

mix of disco styles and new songs performed by various pop artists, but the film has been

presented several times with a version of the original Huppertz score adapted and

conducted by Berndt Heller, and with semi-improvisatory scores performed live by avant-

garde ensembles. It is not possible to make hard-and-fast choices between the different

approaches taken in these cases. Anderson has argued persuasively in favour of the

presentation of a film like Intolerance in proper viewing conditions with the music

originally designed for it, but even she has admitted that such meticulous restorations can

have more historical than aesthetic interest. Meanwhile a case can also be made for the

enlivening use of 'anachronistic' music, particularly for unconventional films, though the

case of Metropolis shows that the use of trendy pop-music scores can make the film itself

look dated when the music itself begins to date and progressive styles of jazz and

minimalism can provide a more effective counterpoint to the film.

It is good to face so many possibilities, even if they stand in such confusing array. The

simple fact is that music for silent films was ever-changing, because live, and to be truly

'authentic' must continue to change. Moreover, it is probably futile to expect that the

musical traditions of silent cinema will ever be fully restored; for one thing, we simply

cannot watch the films in the same way as our ancestors, after so many decades of

experience with sound films, and after so much of the original repertoire has either been

forgotten or has lost any semblance of freshness. The best that can be hoped for, perhaps,

is that from time to time we will be able to return to the theatre to hear a live

accompaniment, whether old or new, that makes an effective match to the film and is

sensitively performed; when this happens, we are better able to imagine the silent

cinema's past glories, and to experience it as an art still vital, a century after it all began.

Bibliography

Anderson, Gillian ( 1990), "No Music until Cue".

Erdmann, Hans, and Becce, Giuseppe ( 1927), Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik.

Gorbman, Claudia ( 1987), Unheard Melodies.

Marks, Martin ( 1995), Music and the Silent Film.

Rapée, Erno ( 1924), Motion Picture Moods.

----- ( 1925), Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures.

Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947)

Marie Prevost and Monte Blue in Ernst Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle ( 1923)

The son of a Jewish tailor, Lubitsch joined Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in 1911 as

supporting actor, and had his first starring part in a film farce, Die Firma heiratet ( 1914).

The role, an absent-minded, accidentprone, and over-sexed assistant in a clothing shop,

established him as a Jewish comedy character. Between 1914 and 1918 he acted in about

twenty such comedies, the majority of which he also directed (among the ones to have

survived are Schuhpalast Pinkus, 1916; Der Blusenkönig, 1917; and Der Fall Rosentopf,

1918).

Lubitsch was the most significant (German film talent to emerge during the war, creating

a type of visual and physical comedy familiar from pre-war Pathé Films, but situated in a

precise ethnic milieu (the German-Jewish lower middle class) and mostly treating the

staple theme of much early German cinema: social rise. After 1918, Lubitsch specialized

in Burlesque spoofs of popular operettas ( Die Austernprinzessin, 1919), of

Hoffmannesque fantasy subjects ( Die Puppe, 1919), and of Shakespeare ( Romeo und

Julia im Schnee and Kohlhiesels Töchter, both 1920). Centred on mistaken identities

( Wenn vier dasselbe tun, 1917), doubles ( Die Puppe, Kohlhiesels Töchter), and female

cross-dressing ( Ich möchte kein Mann sein, 1918), his comedies feature foppish men and

headstrong women, among them Ossi Oswalda ( Ossis Tagebuch, 1917) and Pola Negri

( Madame Dubarry, 1919).

Working almost exclusively for the Projections-AG Union, Lubitsch became the preferred

director of Paul Davidson, who from 1918 onwards produced a series of exotic costume

dramas ( Carmen, 1918; Das Weib des Pharao, 1922), filmed plays ( Die Flamme, 1923),

and historical spectacles ( Anna Boleyn, 1920) which brought both producer and director

world success. The 'Lubitsch touch' lay in the way the films combined erotic comedy with

the staging of historical show-pieces (the French Revolution in Madame Dubarry), the

mise-en-scène of crowds (the court of Henry VIII in Ann Boleyn), and the dramatic use of

monumental architecture (as in his Egyptian and oriental films). But one could also say

that Lubitsch successfully cross-dressed the Jewish schlemihl and let him loose in the

grand-scale stage sets of Max Reinhardt.

Lubitsch's stylistic trademark was a form of visual understatement, flattering the

spectators by letting them into the know, ahead of the characters. Already in his earliest

films, he seduced by surmise and inference, even as he built on the slapstick tradition of

escalating a situation to the point of leading its logic ad absurdum. Far from working out

this logic merely as a formal principle, Lubitsch, in comedies like Die Austernprinzessin (

1919) or Die Bergkatze ( 1921), based it on a sharply topical experience: the escalating

hyperinflation of the immediate post-war years, nourishing starvation fantasies about the

American way of life, addressed to a defeated nation wanting to feast on exotic locations,

erotic sophistication, and conspicuous waste. What made it a typical Lubitsch theme was

the mise-en-scène of elegant self-cancellation, in contrast to other directors of exotic

escapism, who dressed up bombastic studio sets as if to signify a solid world. Lubitsch, a

Berliner through and through, was also Germany's first, and some would say only,

'American' director. He left for the United States in 1921, remaking himself several times

in Hollywood's image, while, miraculously, becoming ever more himself.

If his furst cakkubg card was Rosita ( 1923), an underrated vehicle for Mary Pickford's

ambitions to become a femme mistaken identities. The Marriage Circle ( 1923),

Forbidden Paradise ( 1924), Lady Windermere's Fan ( 1925), and So This is Paris ( 1926)

are gracefully melancholy meditations on adultery, deceit, and self-deception, tying

aristocratic couples and decadent socialites together to each other, in search of love, but

settling for lust, wit, and a touch of malice. After some Teutonic exercises in

sentimentality ( The Student Prince, 1927; The Patriot, 1928), the coming of sound

brought Lubitsch new opportunities to reinvent his comic style. Prominent through his

producerdirector position at Paramount Studios, and aided by the script-writing talents of

Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson, Lubitsch returned to one of his first inspirations;

operetta plots and boulevard theatre intrigues, fashioning from them a typical 1930s

Hollywoodémigré genre, the 'Ruritanian' and 'Riviera' musical comedies, starring mostly

Maurice Chevalier, with Jeanette macDonald, or Claudette Colbert ( The Love Parade,

1929; The Smiling Lieutenant, 1931; The Merry Widow, 1934). Segueing the songs deftly

into the plot lines, and brimming with sexual innuendoes, the films are bravura pieces of

montage cinema. But Lubitsch's reputation deserves to rest on the apparently just as

frivolous, but poignantly balanced, comedies Trouble in Paradise ( 1932), Design for

Living ( 1933), Angel ( 1937), and Ninotchka ( 1939). Invariably love triangles, these

dramas of futility and vanitas between drawing room and boudoir featured, next to

Melvyn Douglas and Herbert Marshall, the screen goddesses Marlene Dietrich and Greta

Garbo, whom Lubitsch showed human and vulnerable, while intensifying their

eroticallure. During the 1940s, Lubitsch's central European Weltschmerz found a suitably

comic-defiant mask in films like The Shop around the Corner ( 1940) and To Be or Not to

Be ( 1942), the latter a particularly audacious attempt to sabotage the presumptions not

only of Nazi rule, but of all tyrantical holds on the real: celebrating, as he had always

done, the saving graces and survivor skills of makebelieve.THOMAS

ELSAESSERSELECT FILMOGRAPHY Schuhpalast Pinkus ( 1916); Ich möchte kein

Mann sein ( 1918); Die Austernprinzessin ( 1919); Madame Dubarry ( 1919); Anna

Boleyn ( 1920); Die Bergkatze ( 1921); Das Weib des Pharao ( 1922); The Marriage

Circle ( 1923); Lady Windermere's Fan ( 1925); So This is Paris ( 1926); The Love Parade

( 1929); Trouble in Paradise ( 1932); Design for Living ( 1933); The Merry Widow

( 1934); Angel ( 1937); Ninotchka ( 1939); The Shop around the Corner ( 1940); To Be or

Not to Be ( 1942)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carringer, Robert, and Sabath, Barry ( 1978), Ernst Lubitsch: A Guide to References and

Resources.

Prinzler, Hans Helmut, and Patalas, Enno (eds.) ( 1984), Lubitsch.

Weinberg, Herman G. ( 1977), The Lubitsch Tough: A Critical Study.

Greta Garbo (1905-1990)

Born Greta Gustafsson, daughter of a Stockholm sanitary worker, Garbo had an unhappy,

impoverished childhood. She entered films via advertising, and after making a comedy

short was discovered by Mauritz Stiller, who renamed her and cast her in Gösta Berlings

saga ( 1924). He also remoulded her. Her advertising films had shown a plump, bouncy

teenager, but stiller drew from her something cool and remote. She was touchingly

vulnerable as a middle-class girl reduced to prostitution in Pabst's Die freudlose Gasse

( 1925), after which she left for Hollywood. Louis B. Mayer had seen Berling and wanted

Stiller, reluctantly he signed the director's young protégée as well.

At a loss what to make of Garbo, MGM dubbled her 'the Norma Shearer of Sweden' and

put her into The Torrent ( 1926), a trashy melodrama that Shearer had turned down. With

the first rushes they realized what they had - not just an actress but a mesmerizing screen

presence. Stiff, bony, and awkward in everyday life, Garbo was transformed on screen

into an image of graceful eroticism. Stiller, his Hollywood career a disaster, returned to

Sweden and an early death while Garbo, distressed by the loss of her mentor, was

propelled to the heights of stardom.

Flesh and the Devil ( 1926), directed by Clarence Brown and co-starring John Gilbert,

confirmed her unique qual0 ity. The urgency of her love scenes with Gilbert (with whom

she was involved off-screen) conveyed a hunger bordering on despair, an avid, mature

sexuality never before seen in American films, and a revelation to audiences used to the

vamping of Pola Negri or the coy flirtings of Clara Bow. Borwn's cinematographer was

William Daniels, who shot nearly all Garbo's Hollywood films and devised for her a

subtle, romantic lighting, rich in expressive half-tones, that did much to enhance her

screen image.

Garbo's combination of sexual need and soulful resignation defined her as the archetypal

Other Woman, fated to play sirens and adulteresses. She twice portrayed one of the

greatest, Anna Karenina, the first time in Love with Gilbert as Vronsky. The rest of her

silent films were unworthy of her, though she had already proved her ability to transcend

the shoddiest material. 'To see, in these early films, Garbo breathe life into an impossible

part', comment Durgnat and Kobal ( 1965), 'is like watching a swan skim the surface of a

pond of schmaltz.'

MGM, having seen the careers of European-accented stars like Negri ruined by sound,

nervously delayed Garbo's first talkie. Anna Christie ( 1930), a pedestrian version of

O'Neill, showed they had no cause for concern. Her voice was deep, vibrant, and

melancholy, her accent exotic but musical. With her status assured as Metro's top female

star, the legend began to grow: the asceticism, the shyness, the reclusiveness. 'I vahnt to

be alone', he image and the woman were hard to disentangle - which made her all the

more fascinating.Costume dramas figured largely in Garbo's 1930s films, not always to

advantage. 'A great actress', wrote Graham Greene, reviewing Conquest ( 1937), 'but what

dull pompous films they make for her.' Here as elsewhere the austerity of her acting was

smothered in period fustian and stilted dialogue, the direction entrusted to sound

journeymen like Brown (who also handled the remade Anna Karenina, 1935). Cukor's

Camille ( 1936) was an improvement, with Garbo heartbreaking in her doomed gaiety, but

in Mamoulian's Queen Christina ( 1933) she gave the performance of her career,

passionate and sexually ambiguous - and, in the final scene, hugging her grief to her like a

concealed dagger.The mystery of Garbo, the haunting aloofness and sense of inner pain,

had made her (and still make her) the object of cult adoration. MGM, as if puzzled what

to do with this enigma, decided she should be funny. ' Garbo laughs!' they announced for

Ninotchka ( 1939), apparently never having noticed the full-throated abandonment of her

laugh before. Acclaimed at the time, the film now looks contrived and, for Lubitsch,

surprisingly' heavy-handed. Two-Faced Woman ( 1941), an attempt at screwball comedy,

was a catastrophe. Garbo announced a temporary retirement from filmmaking - which

became permanent. From time to time, even as late as 1980, come-backs were mooted -

Dorian Gray for Albert Lewin, La Duchesse de Langeais for Ophuls but never

materialized. A legendary recluse, she retreated into inviolable privacy - confirmed in her

status as the greatest of movie starts, because the most unattainable. The woman and the

myth had become indissolubly merged. PHILIP KEMPSELECT FILMOGRAPHY Gösta

Berlings saga ('The Atonement of Gösta Berling) ( 1924); Die freudlose Gasse ( Joyless

Street) ( 1925); Flesh and the Devil ( 1926); Love ( Anna Karenina) ( 1927); A Woman of

Affairs ( 1928); The Kiss ( 1929); Anna Christie ( 1930); Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise

(The Rise of Helga) ( 1931); Mata Hari ( 1932); Grand Hotel ( 1932); As You Desire Me (

1932); Queen Christina ( 1933); The Painted Veil ( 1934); Anna Karenina ( 1935);

Camille ( 1936); Conquest ( Marie Walevska) ( 1937); Ninotchka ( 1939); TwoFaced

Woman ( 1941)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Durgnat, Raymond, and Kobal, John ( 1965), Greta Garbo.

Greene, Graham ( 1972), The Pleasure-Dome.

Haining, Peter ( 1990), The Legend of Garbo.

Walker, Alexander ( 1980), Greta Garbo: A Portrait.

The Heyday of the Silents

GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH

By the middle of the 1920s the cinema had reached a peak of splendour which in certain

respects it would never again surpass. It is true that there was not synchronized sound, nor

Technicolor, except at a very experimental stage. Synchronized sound was to be

introduced at the end of the decade, while Technicolor came into use only in the mid

1930s and beyond. Nor, except in isolated cases like Abel Gance's Napoléon ( 1927), was

there anything approaching the wide screen that audiences were to be accustomed to from

the 1950s onwards. It is also the case that viewing conditions in many parts of the world,

particularly in rural areas, remained makeshift and primitive.

But there were many compensations. Audiences in cities throughout the developed world

were treated to a spectacle which only twenty years earlier would have been

unimaginable. In the absence of on-screen sound there were orchestras and sound effects.

Film stocks using panchromatic emulsion on a nitrate base produced images of great

clarity and detail enhanced by tinting and toning. Flicker effect had been eliminated, and

screens up to 24 X 18 feet in size showed images brightly and without distortion, large

enough to give physical embodiment to the grand scale of the action.

Many of these qualities were to be lost with the coming of sound. Live music disappeared

from all but a handful of auditoriums. Tinting and toning effects were abandoned because

the colour on the film interfered with the sensors for reading the sound-track. The focus of

investment moved from visual effects to the problems of sound recording and, on the

exhibition side, to the installation of playback equipment. Sound also encouraged a loss of

scale, as emphasis shifted to the kind of scenes that could be shot with dialogue. The

spectacular qualities that had distinguished many silent films were reduced as the new

dialogue pictures took over, with musicals as the only significant exception.

The scale of the action projected into the large spaces which film-makers designed films

to be seen in was perhaps the most striking feature of the silent cinema in its heyday.

There was grandeur and a larger-than-life quality both in the panoramic long shots

incorporating landscapes, battles, or orgies, and in the close-ups magnifying details of an

object or a face. It was rare for a film to miss out on opportunities to aggrandize its

subject, whether this was the conquest of the West or life on a collective farm. The houses

of the rich tended to be mansions and those of the poor teeming tenements. Heroes and

heroines were beautiful, villains ugly, and dramatic values were projected on to the bodies

of the performers, enhanced by effects of shot scale and camera angle.

For this concatenation of effect to be achieved, many techniques had to be developed and

made concordant with each other. Film-makers proceeded blindly, with little to guide

them in the way of either precedent or theory. They did not exactly know what effects

they wanted, nor, to the extent that they knew, did they all want exactly the same effects.

As a result there were many experiments-in technology, in dramaturgy, in narrative, in set

design -- some of which proved to have no sequel. A number of distinct styles developed,

notably in Hollywood, but also in Germany, France, the Soviet Union, India, Japan, and

elsewhere. On the whole it was American -- ' Hollywood' -- styles which provided at least

a partial model for film-making throughout the world, but German models were also

influential, even in America, while the Russian 'montage' style was more admired than

imitated.

The style developed in America from about 1912 onwards and consolidated throughout

the silent period has sometimes been called 'classical', to distinguish it on the one hand

from the 'primitive' style which preceded it and on the other hand from other, less

consolidated styles which cropped up elsewhere and on the whole had less historical

success. Although it allowed for effects on a large scale, it was straightforward in the way

effects were marshalled. It was above all a narrative style, designed to let a story unfold in

front of the audience, and it organized its other effects under the banner of narrative

entertainment. Underlying this style, however, were other deepseated characteristics,

including a more generalized 'realistic-illusionist' aesthetic, developed in the industrial

context which increasingly determined the practice of film-making and viewing in the age

of the silent feature.

INDUSTRY

The key to the spectacular development of the silent cinema (and to its rapid transition to

sound at the end of the 1920s) lay in its industrial organization. This was not an incidental

characteristic-as maintained for example by writer, film-maker, and (twice) French

Minister of Culture André Malraux, who once airily described the cinema as being 'par

ailleurs' ('furthermore') an industry. Rather, the potential for industrial development was

built into the cinema from the very beginning, both through its intrinsic dependence on

technology (camera, film stock, projector) and through its emergence in the early period

as, literally, 'show business'. The early cinema should not really be dignified with the

name of industry. It was a ramshackle business, conducted on a small scale, using

equipment and technology which (with the exception of the film stock itself) could be put

together in an artisanal workshop. But as films became more elaborate, and the level of

investment necessary to make them and ensure their distribution increased, so the cinema

came to acquire a genuinely industrial character-in the scale of its operations, in its forms

of organization, and in its dependence on capital.

The definitive industrialization of cinema was not achieved until the coming of sound at

the end of the 1920s, which consummated its integration into the world of finance capital

and its links (via the electric companies) to music recording and radio. But already in the

years after the end of the First World War the cinema had acquired its character as a

prototype of what has since come to be called a culture industry. Like radio and music

recording it was technological by definition, but unlike them it was not just a technology

used to transmit a preexisting content. The content itself was created by means of the

technology. Having been technologically created, films then also had to be distributed to

places where a related technology could be used for showing them. The quantity of

investment, the time scale over which it was deployed, and the need to match supply and

demand imposed on the cinema not only industrial organization at the point of production,

but related business practice at every level. Films were produced for the market, and

operations designed to manage market demands had a great influence on film production.

This was to have unprecedented consequences for every aspect of the medium.

THE STUDIO

Films were produced in studios. Although the American film companies had moved to

southern California in the 1910s partly for the sake of the abundant sunlight and the

variety of locations, by the 1920s a majority of scenes had come to be shot in artificial

settings, either indoors under electric light or outdoors on constructed sets. Film-makers

ventured on to locations only for scenes (or single shots) which could not be simulated in

the studio. Studio shooting not only gave more control of filming conditions, it was also

more economical. The twin needs of economy and control also gave rise to simplified

methods of constructing sets and ever more sophisticated ways of putting shots and

scenes together with the aid of special effects of one kind or another.

Although in common parlance the term special effects is generally reserved for techniques

which simulate fantastic events, many of the same techniques were in practice more often

used for the portrayal of realistic scenesas an easier and cheaper way of shooting them

than if the scene had to be reproduced in actual real settings. The enormous expense of

constructing the actual-size sets for the Babylonian sequence of Griffith's Intolerance

( 1916) spurred film companies to research simpler ways of making it appear as if the

action was taking place in actual three-dimensional space. Within a scene studio shots (for

example close-ups) would be matched to location shots, while a single shot could be

composed of heterogeneous elements carefully merged to look as if it represented a single

reality. A simple device was to paint part of a scene on a glass plate, with the action being

shot through the clear portion of the glass. But there were also more complicated

techniques, such as the one devised by the German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan in

the mid-1920s and used, among other films, on Fritz Lang's Metropolis ( 1927). This

involved constructing miniature sets which were located to the side of the action to be

filmed. A partially scraped mirror was then placed in front of the camera, at an angle of

forty-five degrees. The action was shot through the scraped part of the mirror, while the

sets were reflected through the unscraped part. Alternatively part of the scene could be

obscured by a matte, and inserted into the shot later in the laboratory. Or a background

(shot on location by a second film unit) could be projected on a screen at the back of the

studio, while the characters performed in front of it, though this did not come into

widespread use until the early sound period, when dialogues needed to be recorded in

studio conditions.

The effect of these developments in studio production techniques was to push the cinema

of the late silent period more and more in the direction of realistic illusion, blurring the

boundaries between the obviously illusionistic (the films of Georges Méliès for example),

the theatrical, and the unquestionably real. Fiction films aspired to a reality effect whether

their content was realistic events or fantastic and implausible ones. Only at the margins

were films made which either played on effects for their own sake (or for the audience to

wonder at) or which depended on unmediated authenticity in portraying real events.

Occasionally, as in comedy, these two extremes would be joined and the audience would

be left marvelling both at the fantastic things that were happening (or appeared to be

happening) and at the real physical achievement of the gag taking place in real time in a

real place. More often, however, the resources at the disposal of the studio were deployed

for purposes of a generic verisimilitude; the action had a sufficient 'ring of truth' for the

means of its enactment to pass largely unnoticed.

The idea that cinema could use artifice of many kinds to create a self-sufficient cinematic

reality emerged slowly, and continued to be felt as something of a paradox. The first

person really to get to grips with this paradox was probably the Soviet film-maker and

theoretician Lev Kuleshov, whose famous 'experiments' in the early 1920s were devoted

to showing how the narrative content of single shots was determined by their

juxtaposition rather than by their intrinsic 'real-life' properties. But Kuleshov's

experiments focused almost entirely on montage (the editing together of shots) rather than

on the potential for artifice present in the making of the shot itself, and it was in Germany

and in Hollywood, where the techniques of studio production were most highly

developed, that realist illusionism (more realist in the Hollywood case, more illusionist in

the German) really came into its own as the dominant aesthetic of the silent film.

MELODRAMA, COMEDY, MODERNISM

During the silent period most of the genres emerged that were to characterize the cinema

throughout the studio period -- crime films, Westerns, fantasies, etc. Of the classic genres

only the musical, for obvious reasons, was absent, though many films were made for non-

synchronized musical accompaniment. Overarching the generic categories into which

films were grouped for marketing purposes, however, the films of the silent period (and to

a great extent thereafter) can be categorized under two main 'modes', the comic and the

melodramatic.

The term melodrama is used by film scholars to designate two types of film in particular-

those (particularly in the very early period) which show a clear historical descent from

nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, and the sagas of love and family life (often

overlapping with so-called 'women's pictures') that had such a powerful presence in

Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. These uses are not strictly compatible, since

the two types of film have few particular features in common. Early film melodrama was

highly gestural and involved the accent uating of moral and dramatic values around

characteristic motifs -- heroes spurred to action by revelations of unspeakable villainy,

leading to last-minute rescues of innocent heroines, deus ex machina endings, and the

like. These features are all somewhat attenuated in the socalled melodramas of the later

period, and are instead to be found more often in action films (such as Westerns) than in

the increasingly psychological dramas of the 1930s and after. Links between the two are

to be found in the work of D. W. Griffith, who formalized the means for inserting

melodramatic values into the flow of cinematic narrative and (by his use of the close-up

as both a narrative and an emotive device) gave the conventional melodrama a measure of

psychological depth; and in that of Frank Borzage , who, in Humoresque ( 1920), 7th

Heaven ( 1927), and other films, turned stock figures of melodrama into characters driven

by preternatural inner strength.

The MGM costume department in 1928

More generally, the American cinema in the 1920s had great difficulty in liberating itself

from the narrative schemas of theatrical melodrama and its Griffithian continuation in the

cinema. With the steady increase in the length of films from about 1913 onwards -- from

three or four reels to six or even more in the post-war period -- filmmakers were able to

turn to stories of broader scope and greater complexity, often in the form of adaptations of

novels. Despite the refinement of narrative technique, however, it was rare for this

opportunity to be translated in the direction of realistic and nuanced character

development. Rather (and this is as true if not truer of the bulk of European production as

it was of American) narratives became clotted with incident, while the characters to

whom the incidents happened continued to be drawn in schematic terms. In Rex Ingram's

acclaimed Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ( 1921), for example, the main characters

and the values they represent are proclaimed in the intertitles early in the film and typified

in appearance and gesture throughout the action, which is spread over several decades.

Although the moral values of Griffith's melodramas, and their embodiment in scowling

villains, luckless heroes, and perennially threatened