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The early years of cinema saw huge changes and evolutions in form, technology and exhibition. This period saw films grow from 60-second observational exercises into feature entertainment. The sideshow at the county fair soon became the primary leisure activity. The back rooms of cafes became 1000 seat movie palaces.
The early performances were organised by travelling businessmen, who travelled the fairs of Europe and America, showing their collections of re-enacted state visits and battles, sketches, magic tricks and acrobatic acts. The first permanent movie theatres, the Nickelodeons (entry cost a nickel), showed one or two hour programmes of 10-15 minute “one-reelers” of various types. One of the most popular was the chase film, where a villain was chased by a policeman, or a man with no trousers by an angry crowd. The filmmakers who produced these films freed the camera from a single, “theatrical” position and began to create tension in their films. The low production costs of these short films and the absence of a language barrier created an extremely active export market.
The low production costs allowed the pioneers Melies, Lumiere and Paul to operate as directors, actors, producers, cameramen and projectionists, but eventually this inefficient system was, with a demand for more equipment and more complex films, replaced by a job specific industry supported by powerful financial backers. When the more profitable rental system replaced the sale of copies in 1907, the pioneers were finally replaced by the industry.
At the same time, films were being criticised for their simplicity, and cinema was being called, not for the last time, “mindless, unimaginative fare”. Well-known authors and stage actors were engaged in an attempt to rescue the image of cinema. The Lafitte brothers founded a company to produce “art” films. Their literary adaptations were considered improvements over recent productions, but they simply mimicked the theatre and the theatrical acting looked ridiculous on screen.
One group of filmmakers who were experimenting with cinematic technique were those who emerged from Brighton in the early years of the century. George Albert Smith was the first to experiment with composing scenes from individual shots and camera perspectives. This moved away from the theatrical stationary camera and showed that film could establish meaning through the relationship between images. James Williamson had identified that film did not have to show the whole length of an event by inserting a cutaway to compress the length of a rowing regatta. However, the Brighton filmmakers encountered the same problems as Melies et al, with their “craftsmen” approach unable to keep pace with the growing international industry.
Early Italian films were not based on the theatre, but instead showed that film could be epic as well as dramatic. The Italian film companies specialised in elaborately filmed historical events, with gigantic outdoor sets and hundreds of extras. The most expensive of the early Italian epics was “Cabiria”, almost three hours long, using huge numbers of extras, camels, elephants, fantastic sets, exotic locations, and shot with varied shot sizes and lengths. It was also cut with experimental alternating montages, and was the first film to use aesthetic lighting.
It was the Danes, and the husband and wife team of director Urban Gad and actress Asta Nielson, who demonstrated that cinematic acting needed to be very different to the theatre, and that tiny gestures could reveal a full range of emotions.
Until 1905, legal wrestling over patents restricted the development of the industry in the USA and allowed several European nations to establish themselves in the fledgling world market. In order to escape the restrictions of Edison’s cartel (MPPC), the independent producers moved from New York to the small Californian town of Hollywood, which offered good weather and several different types of landscape. By 1914, 50% of all productions distributed worldwide emanated from Hollywood.
One of the best known of the early films, The Great Train Robbery (1903) was also one of the most influential. Composed of several scenes, its director, Edwin S. Porter, used energetic action and scene changes, plus pan shots to create tension and alter the tempo of the film. He also used two independent plot lines before bringing them together for a final showdown.
The most important of the early American directors was D.W. Griffith. He is hailed as the inventor of film montage, and he recognised that it is the individual shot, rather than the scene, that is the central element of cinematic language. He experimented with new, varied shot sizes and rapid, action-packed sequences. He developed the guidelines of continuity editing that Hollywood cinema still uses today, and he was also the first director to mount the camera on a crane.
World War One was a turning point in film history. In those countries involved in the war, film production declined, personnel went to the front and factories producing equipment and stock started producing munitions. Markets were lost on opposing sides, even though there was a wartime boom in demand. This allowed the USA to become market leader, a position it has held ever since. The war also created a new form of film; “patriotic” propaganda. Not for the last time, while Europeans used the mass appeal of film for political purposes, Americans saw the potential for commercial exploitation.
The enormous expansion into studio production was funded by New York banks, who controlled the decision-making process and assigned “box office value” to films based on such criteria as “star value”, “production value”, and “story value”. Apart from a handful of exceptions, the names of the directors were unknown by the public, but stars were extensively promoted. Both directors and actors belonged to the studios and did what they were told if they wanted to be able to collect their pay cheques. The studios output was divided into A and B pictures. A films were expensive, prestigious pictures featuring the contracted stars, while the B pictures were cheap and often forced upon the cinemas in the block booking system (“If you want this A film, you’ll have to show these B films too”).
The most popular genre of the early years was undoubtedly the comedy. The “father of slapstick”, Mack Sennett, produced over 500 one-reelers, and the names of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel & Hardy are widely known even today.
The First World War severely restricted the international influence of the European film nations, with Hollywood controlling the world market almost unchallenged since the 1920’s. The studios controlled the largest production budgets in the world, allowing them to invest huge sums in stars, sets, costumes and special effects. This made it more sensible for the European film industry to simply import American films than to produce their own. The decline of the former European industry leaders made room for a new generation of film artists. Small companies attempted to conquer their own niche markets with avant-garde productions. The young artists created alternatives to Hollywood’s standardised mass production, inspired by the aesthetic advances of Griffith. Educated people became increasingly interested in the cinema. Film clubs were set up across Europe and prompted theoretical debate in film magazines.
The French Impressionists were particularly successful in creating enthusiasm amongst the intellectual public. A group of directors (Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, Abel Gance, Marcel L’Herbier and Jean Ebstein) affiliated themselves with impressionistic art and presented their theories in poetic essays. For them, art conveyed not truth, but experiences. The personal view of the artist and “emotions instead of stories” should comprise the core of the film and allow it to become the “poetic expression of the soul”. Photographing an object, wrote Delluc, lends it new meaning by opening the viewer to the perspective of the person filming.
The Impressionists at first concentrated on the image, using optical tricks to illustrate the impressions of the characters: dreams, memories, visions and thoughts. They made shots with a distorted mirror, put excerpts of pictures through filters, or divided the frame into smaller individual pictures. They emphasised subjectivity with the “subjective camera”; using extreme perspectives, and tilted angles and movements that showed the scene through the eyes of the characters. They attached great importance to the mise-en-scene (the staging). They encouraged untheatrical and reserved acting, and used lighting effectively to illuminate sets that were often designed by contemporary painters and architects in the cubist or art deco style. After 1923 the Impressionists moved away from the picture and camera focus to experiment with quick rhythmical cut sequences, having been inspired, like many, by Griffith’s daring montages.
In search of the pure art of film, some avant-garde filmmakers moved away from stories and content entirely and turned to the radical “cinema pur”, also known as “absolute film”. The originators of this graphically abstract approach intended to free film not just from dramatic elements, but also from photographic documentary aspects, and defined film as rhythmic patterns of colours and forms, as “paintings in time”.
The avant-garde film of the 1920’s reached its apex, and the greatest public attention, with the films of Luis Bunuel. He presented shocking images, influenced by psychoanalysis, and rebelled against sexual and political repression of every kind. The surrealist movement exerted a strong influence on the re-direction of European film following WWII, particularly on the directors Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Cocteau, Carlos Saura and Bernardo Bertolucci.
German film production during WWI consisted of un-imaginative entertainment, but this changed when attempts were made to produce a popular expressionist art film. This was enthusiastically supported by the large film companies who hoped that an aesthetic novelty could pave the way for a re-invigorated German export effort and would win a new, middle class audience.
Expressionist artists had already established themselves in the theatre and painting as a reaction to realism. They aimed at portraying the inner reality of emotions. German expressionism owes its success above all to its artificial sets and staging. Set designers created inspired sets that reflected the inner lives of the characters. They came very close to contemporary theatre; created in front of, rather than with the camera. The actors acted with exaggerated movements, which make them seem like stilted gestures today. The stage sets were draped in expressive light and shadow effects, while unusual rotations of axis and extreme camera angles gave them an eerie atmosphere. This artificial style did not last for long, but its influence on the development of the horror and gangster films of the 30’s is undeniable.
After the Soviet revolution, young artists began work on creating a socialist art. As in other arts, filmmakers used futurism and constructivism as a starting point. The Soviet filmmakers greatly admired Griffith and his montage technique. The experimental further development of montage became one of the key features of Russian avant-garde film.
Griffith employed montage primarily for heightening dramatic tension. At the film college in Moscow a group of young filmmakers gathered under the leadership of Lev Kuleshov, who attempted to find theoretical and experimental ways in which abstract thoughts could be portrayed on film. The primary thesis was that in the cinema the cut ranks ahead of the picture content, so meaning is communicated through montage rather than mise-en-scene. “With montage”, stated Kuleshov, “ one can destroy, repair, or entirely reformulate one’s material”.
Among the most important representatives of the movement are Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov. They showed in their films the multiple possibilities of cinematic montage. Eisenstein first promoted the “montage of attractions” and the “collision montage”, a quick sequence of emotionally charged pictures, which in a shocking manner collide with one another in order to shake the viewer and to bring him to new realisations. In his first film “Strike”, he combined images of the murder of strikers against bloody sequences from a slaughterhouse. Montage served Pudovkin as a means to illustrate feelings and had the goal of awakening the emotions of the viewers rather than provoking them to be reflective. The images of protesting factory workers alternates with rays of sunlight, which tear through the walls of clouds, forming a metaphor of revolutionary hope. Stalinist totalitarianism finally put a halt to the desire for experimentation of the Soviet avant-garde, and from then on, Soviet films were supposed to offer either light entertainment or encourage the formation of the socialist state.
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A Short History of Film
Pt. 1: Silent Cinema 1895-1927
Pt. 2: Studio System 1927-1945
Pt. 3: Post-War 1945-1959
Pt. 4: New Waves 1959-1975
Pt. 5: Blockbusters 1975-2002
