A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DA History of Motion Pictures by Vito Russo
Motion pictures were developed scientifically long before their artistic or commercial possibilities were realized and explored. One of the earliest scientific advances leading directly to the development of motion pictures was the publication of a paper by English scholar Peter Mark Roget in 1824 enunciating the principle of "The Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects." It established that the human eye retains an image for a fraction of a second longer than the image is actually present. Roget's paper inspired scientists to invent various ways to demonstrate the principle. Early Experiments In both the United States and Europe, pictures drawn by hand were animated as amusements, using devices that became popular in the parlors of the middle class. Specifically, it was found that if 16 pictures are made of a movement that occurs in one second and are shown successively within one second, persistence of vision puts them together and they are seen as moving. A band of such drawings mounted on the inside of a revolving drum was called a zoetrope. When viewed through slits in the side of the spinning drum, the drawings appeared to move. A more elaborate device was the Praxinoscope of French inventor Charles Émile Reynaud. It consisted of a revolving drum with a ring of mirrors placed at the center and pictures inside the wall of the drum. As the drum revolved, the pictures seemed to come to life. At about the same time, William Henry Fox Talbot in England and Louis Daguerre in France were working on the first practical photographic process, perfected by 1839. As early as 1852, photographs began to replace drawings in viewing machines. By 1861 American inventor Coleman Sellers had patented the Kinematoscope, which brought to life a series of posed photographs mounted on a turning paddlewheel. In picture parlors, the Kinematoscope crudely projected photographs for the audience by flashing them rapidly on a screen. As the speed of photographic emulsions increased, it became possible to photograph actual movement instead of posed phases of movement. In 1877 English-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge used a battery of 24 cameras to record the cycle of motion of a running horse. A significant step toward the development of the first motion-picture camera was taken by French physiologist Étienne Jules Marey, whose portable chronophotographe moved a single band of images past an aperture at a steady speed. His filmstrip consisted of oiled paper, however, which easily buckled and tore. By 1889, American inventors Hannibal Goodwin and George Eastman had developed strips of high-speed emulsion mounted on strong celluloid. Their innovation removed a major obstacle to more efficient experimentation with moving pictures.
Until the 1890s, scientists were interested chiefly in the development of photography rather than cinematography. This changed when American inventor Thomas Alva Edison set up the Black Maria, a tarpaper shack near his West Orange, New Jersey, laboratories that became the site of Edison's moving-picture experiments and the world's first movie studio. Edison is generally credited with devising the original movie machine, the Kinetoscope, but his assistant, the inventor William K. L. Dickson, did most of the actual work. Dickson devised the sprocket system, still in use today, by which the film is moved through the camera. He even succeeded, as early as 1889, in producing a rudimentary talking picture. The Kinetoscope, patented by Edison in 1891, ran about 15 m (about 50 ft) of film in an endless loop past a magnifying screen for the viewer. The coin-operated machines were introduced in public parlors in New York City in 1894 and appeared in London, Berlin, and Paris before the end of the year.
Experiments in projecting motion pictures for more than one person proceeded simultaneously in the United States and Europe, combining Edison's Kinetoscope with magic-lantern techniques. In France the Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, introduced their cinématographe, a combination printer, camera, and projector, in 1895. The Lumières produced a highly successful series of short films depicting motion for its own sake, including workers streaming from a factory, waves crashing against the shore, and a gardener watering a lawn. One of their most effective films featured a mail train rushing at the viewer, causing audiences to recoil in fear. More elaborate and distinctively theatrical films were produced in the United States at the Edison studio, where circus entertainers, dancers, and dramatic actors performed for the cameras. By this time, equipment had been standardized, and such films were immediately marketed on an international scale.
In 1896 the French magician Georges Méliès proved that film could interpret life as well as record it. He made a series of films that explored the narrative potential of the new medium, and the one-reeler was born. In 1899, in a studio on the outskirts of Paris, Méliès reconstructed a ten-part version of the trial of French army officer Alfred Dreyfus and filmed Cinderella (1900) in 20 scenes. He is chiefly remembered, however, for his clever fantasies, such as A Trip to the Moon (1902), in which he exploited the trick possibilities of the movie camera. Méliès discovered that, by stopping the camera in midshot and then rearranging the scene before continuing, he could make things disappear on film. Also, by cranking back the film a few feet and starting the next shot, he was able to achieve superimposition, double exposure, and dissolves. His short films were an instant hit with the public and were shown internationally. Although considered little more than curiosities today, they are significant precursors of techniques and styles for an art form then in its infancy. The documentary style of the Lumière brothers and the theatrical fantasies of Méliès merged in the realistic fiction of American inventor Edwin S. Porter, who is often called the father of the story film. Working at the Edison studio, Porter produced the first major American film, The Great Train Robbery, in 1903. The eight-minute film greatly influenced the development of motion pictures because of such innovations as the intercutting of scenes shot at different times and in different places to form a unified narrative, culminating in a chase to achieve primitive suspense. In doing this, Porter developed editing, one of the fundamental techniques of film creation. In film editing, pieces of selected celluloid are put together to achieve a forced perspective capable of manipulating the minds and emotions of an audience. The Great Train Robbery was extremely successful and is credited with turning movies into a popular art. Small theaters called nickelodeons sprang up throughout the United States, and motion pictures began to emerge as an industry. Most one-reelers of the time were short comedies, adventure stories, or filmed records of performances by leading actors of the day.
Between 1909 and 1912 all aspects of the fledgling industry were controlled by the Motion Picture Patents Company, a trust consisting of leading producers. They limited the length of films to one or two reels and refused to grant screen credit to players. The trust was successfully challenged in 1912, however, when independent producers in Europe and the United States formed their own production and exhibition companies. They exhibited full-length feature films such as Quo Vadis? (1912) from Italy and Queen Elizabeth (1912) from France, the latter starring French actor Sarah Bernhardt.
The example of Italy in particular, which, with 717 films in production, had the most advanced national cinema in the world in 1912, spurred American producers to action. They pushed for longer films, more artistic freedom for directors, and screen credit for players, some of whom were obviously becoming public favorites. As a result, there followed a period of major economic and artistic expansion in American film.
The most influential filmmaker of the early silent period was American producer and director D. W. Griffith, who developed the aesthetics of the motion picture. In 1908, at the Biograph studio in New York City, Griffith began to refine the elements of moviemaking as they had evolved up to that time. He used the camera functionally, starting his shots only on significant action and stopping as soon as the action was completed. He also moved the camera closer to his players in order to heighten emotion; he was the first director to use the close-up as a means of emphasis, flying in the face of the popular belief that audiences would not understand two eyes or a hand filling the screen. Griffith trained and developed his own company of actors, which came to include future stars such as Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Lillian Gish. He experimented freely with lighting, camera angles, and lense filters to achieve unique effects. Griffith also broke his scenes into a number of different shots, timing their lengths to create increasing excitement as well as a rhythmic momentum never before achieved on film. He proved that the basis of film expression is editing and that the unit of editing is the shot, not the scene. In 1913 Griffith completed the first of his epics, Judith of Bethulia, in four reels. Biograph executives were outraged at its length and failed to release it until 1914, by which time longer films had become more common. In the meantime, Griffith left Biograph to join the Mutual studio in Hollywood, California, and had begun work on his 12-reel film about the American Civil War (1861-1865), The Birth of a Nation (1915), the screen's first true masterwork, which marked the emergence of motion pictures as a full-fledged art form. The Birth of a Nation possesses a cumulative power that took audiences by storm. The spectacle of battle is expertly mixed with the pathos of human drama. From the very outset, however, it was an immensely controversial film because of its sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan and its racist caricatures of African-Americans. The film sparked riots at the time of its release and remains a subject of controversy. Griffith's later film Intolerance (1916) is often cited as one of the greatest motion pictures ever made. An immense historical pageant, it tells four stories from separate epochs simultaneously, cutting from one to another with a visual and emotional force that has seldom been equaled on the screen.
Between 1915 and 1920, grandiose movie palaces proliferated throughout the United States. The film industry moved gradually but firmly out of the East to Hollywood, where such independent producers as Thomas Harper Ince, Cecil B. De Mille, and Mack Sennett set up their own studios. Ince introduced the unit system, by which movie production was decentralized, enabling several films to be made simultaneously by unit managers answerable to a studio head. Hundreds of films a year poured from the studios to fill an increasing demand from theaters. The vast majority of them were Westerns, slapstick comedies, and such elegant romantic melodramas as DeMille's Male and Female (1919), starring Gloria Swanson. Ince specialized in hard-hitting, unsentimental Westerns, notably those starring popular cowboy actor William S. Hart.
Mack Sennett became known as the king of comedy. He introduced slapstick to the screen in a series of wildly imaginative films starring his enormously popular Keystone Kops. Sennett's style of comedy was altogether new, combining elements of vaudeville, the circus, comic strips, and pantomime. He was a master of timing who kept his films moving at a dizzying pace. Sennett once said that a gag could be planted, developed, and completed in less than 100 feet of film, or one minute on the screen. He had a talent for creating an atmosphere in which artistic temperament could flourish. His corps of players included Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, and an English comic named Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin, whose presence in a film virtually assured its success, was the first truly international movie star and a legend well within his own lifetime. Chaplin's "little tramp" character, which enjoyed an almost idolatrous popularity, displayed a superb range of comedy, satire, pathos, and common humanity. The "Little Fellow," as he was called, was continuously developed and expanded by Chaplin in such films as The Tramp (1915), Easy Street (1917), The Kid (1921), and The Gold Rush (1925). Chaplin continued to produce, direct, and star in his own films well into the sound era and was especially memorable in The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Limelight (1952). In 1919 Chaplin, along with D. W. Griffith and popular stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, formed the original United Artists Corporation and ushered in the star system as well as a golden age of silent film in the United States.
Motion-picture production in England, Italy, and Scandinavia declined drastically at the end of World War I (1914-1918) due to rising costs and an inability to compete in a growing world market. In Germany, the Soviet Union, and France, however, the movies achieved new artistic significance, marking an influential period in the development of the medium.
The striking and innovative German silent cinema drew much from expressionist art and from classical theater techniques of the period. The most celebrated example of expressionist filmmaking of the time is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), by Robert Wiene, in which highly stylized costumes and settings were used to tell the story from a madman's point of view. A similar concern with the supernatural is evident in such films as The Golem (1920), by Paul Wegener; the vampire film Nosferatu (1922), by F. W. Murnau; and the science-fiction spectacle Metropolis (1926), by Fritz Lang, which deals with a robotlike society controlled by an evil superindustrialist. By the mid-1920s the technical proficiency of the German film industry surpassed any other in the world. Artists and directors were given almost limitless support from the state, which financed the largest and best-equipped studios in the world: the huge Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft, popularly known as UFA, near Berlin. Introspective, expressionist studies of lower-class life known as street films were marked by dignity, beauty, and lengthier treatment of their subject, displaying great strides in the effective use of lighting, sets, and photography. German directors freed the camera from the tripod and put it on wheels, achieving a mobility and grace never seen before. Films such as Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924), starring Emil Jannings, and The Joyless Street (1925), by G. W. Pabst, starring Swedish-American actor Greta Garbo, were internationally acclaimed for their depth of feeling and technical innovation. The deteriorating economy of the Weimar Republic, however, enabled American studios to lure away the best of German film talent-including such giants as Lang, Murnau, and Jannings-and German films declined quickly after 1925, becoming mere imitations of Hollywood productions.
A cycle of great Soviet films appeared between 1925 and 1930, revolutionary in both theme and content and of extraordinary visual impact. The Soviet film industry was nationalized in 1919 under the People's Commissariat of Propaganda and Education. Films of the period played out recent Soviet history with a power, realism, and scope that was the antithesis of introspective German cinema. The Soviet Union's two greatest directors, Sergey Mikhaylovich Eisenstein and Vsevolod Ilarionovich Pudovkin, were directly influenced by Griffith's Intolerance and used the dynamics of editing to dazzling effect. The basis of their credo was the concept of montage, a method of shooting and rapidly interspersing separate shots to force a given impression on the mind of the viewer. The most spectacular use of this technique can be seen in Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925), which concerns the mutiny of a battleship crew over spoiled food, and the warm reception given the rebels by the town of Odessa. In the famous "Odessa steps" sequence of the film, Eisenstein climaxed an assault on the townspeople by soldiers with a rapid series of scenes showing the precarious progress of an unattended baby carriage down a monumental outdoor staircase, a grandmotherly woman being shot, a student recoiling in horror, and troops moving the crowd along with poised bayonets. The sequence elicits a unified emotional response to a series of simultaneous events. Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Eisenstein's October (1928), also known as Ten Days That Shook the World, commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik rise to power with different approaches. Pudovkin narrates the story of the individual as hero, a personification of the masses. For Eisenstein, whose films are more purely cinematic, the masses themselves are the hero. Both filmmakers were excellent writers and film theorists who analyzed their own work and that of others to the enrichment of a growing body of film criticism being published all over the world.
Only in France was there sufficient vigor on the part of filmmakers to survive the post-World War I period without government assistance. Working out of small studios, rented for one film at a time, a diverse group of artists realized both avant-garde and traditional forms of cinema with a minimum of executive interference. Author and editor Louis Delluc was an ardent champion of the French cinema who surrounded himself with filmmakers such as Abel Gance, René Clair, Jean Epstein, and Germaine Dulac, a group largely responsible for reviving French film. Delluc's Fièvre (Fever, 1922) is an impressionist portrait of lower-class life. René Clair's The Italian Straw Hat (1927) is a delightfully imaginative comedy based on a popular 19th-century farce. Gance's Napoléon (1927) was an epic forerunner of wide-screen technique that involves, in part, three screens separated into as many as 32 images. One of the most eloquent French productions of the 1920s is The Passion of Joan of Arc (1929), by Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer. Working with an international cast and crew, Dreyer merged the best of the Scandinavian, German, and Soviet schools of filmmaking into a gracefully fluid style of his own, expertly fusing form and content with an operatic reverence for his material. The performance of Maria Falconetti as Joan is considered one of the finest examples of silent-screen acting. The Passion of Joan of Arc, the last of the great silent films along with Murnau's American production of Sunrise (1927), all but spoke, bringing the medium to the threshold of sound.
After World War I, motion-picture production became a major American industry, generating millions of dollars in assets for successful producers. American films became international in character and dominated the world market. Artists responsible for the most successful European films were imported by American studios, and their techniques were adapted and assimilated by Hollywood. The star system flourished, and films featured such top attractions as Rudolph Valentino, John Barrymore, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, and Norma Shearer. The period was also characterized by an attempt to regulate the moral values of motion pictures through a Hollywood Production Code instituted by the industry in 1930 and initially administered by politician Will H. Hays. Official film-censorship bodies of one type or another existed in the United States until 1968. In the 1920s American films began to have a sophistication and smoothness of style that synthesized all that had previously been learned about making movies. Stately, romantic Westerns, such as The Iron Horse (1924), directed by John Ford, showed the craftsmanship that would mark the careers of American directors such as Frank Capra, William Wyler, and George Stevens. Cecil B. De Mille, while seeming to mask the lubricity of his early sex comedies, such as The Affairs of Anatol (1921), behind the biblical facade of spectacles such as The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927), in fact inserted orgies and bathing scenes into his films at every opportunity. Two of the most popular directors of the time, Ernst Lubitsch and Erich von Stroheim, revealed sophisticated and distinctively different temperaments on the screen. Lubitsch abandoned the spectacles he had directed in Germany for light, romantic comedies noted for their simple decor, elegant technique, and the charm with which Lubitsch managed to imbue them. His films were said to have the "Lubitsch touch." In films such as The Marriage Circle (1924) and So This Is Paris (1926), Lubitsch so adroitly handled sexual subject matter as to render it both pointed and censorproof. Von Stroheim's work, harsh and more European in tone than Lubitsch's, is richly extravagant and sometimes brooding, as in Foolish Wives (1921), which contrasts American innocence with European decadence. His masterwork on avarice in American society, Greed (1924), was reduced by studio executives from ten to two hours. Most of the cut footage has been lost, but even in its abbreviated state the film is considered one of the high points of realism on the screen. Screen comedy enjoyed a golden age in the 1920s. Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, two major American comedians whose work was directly influenced by the slapstick traditions of the one-reelers, joined Chaplin in the forefront of the genre. During this period, each of these comedians was given the time and the financial backing to develop and elaborate on his distinctive character. Keaton never smiled, and in films such as Sherlock Jr. (1924) he contrasted his immobile face with sight gags based on his remarkable physical dexterity. Harold Lloyd was a daredevil comedian who played the naive, all-American boy in films such as The Freshman (1925), often acting the part of the weakling who proves his manhood.
The earliest films were documentaries in the sense that they simply recorded what was happening. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the flight of the Wright brothers in France in 1908, and the eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily in 1910 were all recorded by movie cameras and incorporated into Pathé Gazette newsreels, which originated in France in 1909, were launched in the United States in 1910 and in the United Kingdom in 1911, and remained in production through the early 1950s. Once the story film became popular, however, the fact film was almost totally neglected until the emergence of filmmaker Robert Flaherty in the early 1920s. Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), a study of Inuit (Eskimo) life, possesses the intimacy and warm personal contact that seemed missing from previous exercises in recording real life. Although Flaherty's subsequent work, especially Moana (1926) and Man of Aran (1934), came under attack as being somewhat fictionalized, he succeeded in reviving interest in the documentary film, later to reach its zenith in England.
In 1926 the Warner Brothers studio introduced the first practicable sound films, using a process known as Vitaphone, the recording of musical and spoken passages on large discs that were then synchronized with the action on the screen. In 1927 Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer, its first talking picture, starring American entertainer Al Jolson, and sound films were an immediate success with the public. Jolson's line "You ain't heard nothing yet!" from The Jazz Singer signaled the end of the silent era. By 1931 Vitaphone was obsolete, replaced by the less clumsy, easily adaptable Movietone system, a method of recording sound directly on film in a strip alongside the picture. This standard process, developed by American inventor Lee De Forest, enabled sound films to become an international phenomenon almost overnight.
The transition from silent to sound films was so rapid that many films released in 1928 and 1929 had begun production as silents and had been hastily turned into sound films, or talkies, to meet the growing demand. Theater owners rushed to convert their facilities to accommodate sound. The earliest talkies simply exploited raw sound for novelty. Elaborate literary productions were filmed, and extraneous sound effects were introduced at every opportunity. Audiences soon grew weary of monotonous dialogue and the static situations resulting from the grouping of actors around a stationary microphone. Such problems were defeated at the outset of the 1930s by directors in several countries who had the imagination to use sound creatively. They liberated the microphone to reestablish a fluid sense of cinema and discovered the benefits of postsynchronization, which permitted subtler manipulation of both music and dialogue. In the United States, Lubitsch and King Vidor explored the possibilities of shooting long sequences without sound, adding it later to highlight the action. Lubitsch did this charmingly, with music, in The Love Parade (1929), and Vidor used sound atmospherically to create a natural mood in Hallelujah! (1929), a drama with music set in the South. Directors learned how to create effects by using sound from an unseen source, realizing that if the viewer hears a clock ticking, for instance, showing the clock isn't necessary. Screenwriters Ben Hecht, Dudley Nichols, and Robert Riskin began to invent dialogue that was particularly suited to films, stripped of nonessentials to serve the action rather than stifle it. The rapid-fire newspaper language written by Hecht for The Front Page (1931), directed by Lewis Milestone, contrasts with the witty repartee he wrote for Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933). Nichols excelled in clear, unambiguous dialogue for films such as John Ford's Mary of Scotland (1936). Riskin won acclaim for creating familiar characters in the films of Frank Capra, notably in It Happened One Night (1934), starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable.
Gangster films and musicals dominated the screen in the early 1930s. The highly successful Little Caesar (1930) made a star of Edward G. Robinson and spawned a series of violent reflections on America during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the era of Prohibition. Films such as Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) brought speed, vigor, and realism to the screen, as did musicals and zany comedies that seemed to have a nonconformist attitude toward life. Warner Brothers' highly successful musical 42nd Street (1933) began a trend in elaborate dance films, uniquely choreographed by Busby Berkeley. They eventually gave way to the more intimate song-and-dance films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, who enchanted audiences in Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936). Popular comics such as W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy created elaborate and distinct farcical worlds with which their public came to identify. Much of the violence and sexual innuendo in the early gangster and musical-comedy films was toned down by the emergence of the Catholic Legion of Decency and the strengthening of censorship laws in 1934.
Most directors of the 1930s concentrated on providing popular vehicles for such well-known stars as Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, and Clark Gable, whose personalities were often portrayed to the public as extensions of the roles they played. The vogue of filming popular novels, never really absent from the screen, reached a zenith in the late 1930s with expensively mounted productions of A Tale of Two Cities (1935), The Good Earth (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939), and one of the most popular films in motion-picture history, Gone with the Wind (1939).
The trend toward escapism and fantasy in motion pictures was strong throughout the 1930s. A cycle of classic horror films, including Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and The Mummy (1932), emerged from Universal studios, spawning a series of sequels and spin-offs that lasted through the decade. One of the most enduring films of the time is the musical fantasy The Wizard of Oz (1939), based on a book by L. Frank Baum, and starring young Judy Garland, who became the premier musical performer of the 1940s.
The escapism of Hollywood films was partly offset in the 1930s by art-house presentations of more serious, realistic films from Europe, such as The Blue Angel (1930) from Germany-in which director Josef von Sternberg introduced actor Marlene Dietrich to filmgoers-and Grand Illusion (1937) from France, directed by Jean Renoir and considered one of the great antiwar statements in film history. One American filmmaker who came to Hollywood from radio in 1940 was the writer-director-actor Orson Welles, whose urge to experiment with new camera angles and sound effects greatly extended the vocabulary of sound film. Although he had difficulty adapting to conventional Hollywood discipline and was often unable to obtain financial support for his projects, his Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) have influenced the subsequent work of virtually every major filmmaker in the world.
Film production in Europe was sporadic as World War II (1939-1945) approached. In Germany during the Nazi regime, film production was given over to such propagandistic documentaries as Triumph of the Will (1935), a celebration of the National Socialist party by Leni Riefenstahl. Soviet cinema re-created operas and ballets in films that were often static and overly elaborate. Exceptions are two well-edited, visually challenging films by Sergey Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky (1938) and the two-part Ivan the Terrible (1944-1946). In France cinema remained more flexible and cosmopolitan. The works of Jean Renoir continued to enjoy an international reputation, and filmmaker Jean Vigo evidenced a strong sense of imagery in Zéro de Conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933) and L'Atalante (1934). Highly individual directors emerged during this period in spite of the chaotic condition of the French film industry during and after World War II. Even during the height of the German occupation of France, Marcel Carné produced a masterpiece, Les Enfants du Paradis (The Children of Paradise, 1945), employing hundreds of extras in a stylized, theatrical allegory of love and death lasting more than three hours on the screen.
Apart from the early work of director Alfred Hitchcock, who began making feature films in the United States in 1939, and the postwar work of director Carol Reed, such as Odd Man Out (1946), the most important development in English cinema in the 1930s and 1940s was the documentary movement led by John Grierson. Grierson coined the word documentary, which he defined as the "creative treatment of actuality," setting it apart from travelogues and newsreels. His government-supported films-Song of Ceylon (1934), Housing Problems (1935), and Night Mail (1936)-include interviews and dramatic re-creations of events, foreshadowing the docudrama.
Grierson's films substantially influenced documentary work in the United States, notably that of filmmaker Pare Lorentz, whose The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937) are poetic, powerful reflections on the relationship between people and their land. Both films, along with The City (1939), a technically fascinating study of city planning by Willard Van Dyke, were presented to popular acclaim at the 1939 New York World's Fair. During World War II, American filmmakers mixed documentary styles with forms of fiction to produce reenactments of true stories in such thrillers as The House on 92nd Street (1945) by Henry Hathaway, an anti-Nazi spy film based on FBI records. The documentary movement induced Hollywood to match the photorealism of documentaries with combat films such as The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), a tough look at war correspondent Ernie Pyle and his interaction with soldiers on the front lines.
Experiments with color films began as early as 1906, and color was occasionally used in subsequent motion pictures as a novelty, but most of the processes that were developed, including early two-color Technicolor, were disappointing and failed to generate enthusiasm on the part of the public. By 1933 the Technicolor process had been perfected as a commercially viable three-color system, which was first used in the 1935 film Becky Sharp, an adaptation of Vanity Fair by English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. The popularity of color grew, and it was used increasingly throughout the 1940s, notably in a series of classic Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) musicals including Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Easter Parade (1948). In the 1950s the use of color increased so sharply as to all but eclipse the black-and-white film. So-called small films striving for quiet realism-such as Marty (1955), by Delbert Mann, about the aspirations of a Bronx butcher, and The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), by Otto Preminger, dealing with drug addiction-were made in black and white. By the 1960s, however, it was considered a major departure when Alfred Hitchcock filmed Psycho (1960) in black and white and when director Peter Bogdanovich did the same with The Last Picture Show in 1971. More recently, the films The Elephant Man (1980) by David Lynch, Raging Bull (1980) by Martin Scorsese, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982) by Carl Reiner, Zelig (1983) and Shadows and Fog (1992) by Woody Allen, Dead Again (1991) by Kenneth Branagh, Ed Wood (1994) by Tim Burton, and Schindler's List (1994) by Steven Spielberg, have marked a return to imaginative use of black-and-white cinematography.
After World War II the popularity of motion pictures began to be challenged by the advent of television. Estimates of weekly audience attendance dropped from 85 million during the war to about 45 million by the end of the 1950s. The movies responded with size and spectacle.
In 1953 the Twentieth Century-Fox studio premiered its biblical epic The Robe in a new process called CinemaScope, which created a wide-screen revolution in the film industry. In rapid succession studios introduced a series of wide-screen processes such as VistaVision, Todd-AO, Panavision, Superscope, and Technirama. Only Todd-AO and Panavision ultimately survived. Involving one camera, one projector, and standard-size film, they were the most easily adaptable of the various systems; their success permanently changed the shape of the motion-picture screen. Colorful, star-studded wide-screen musicals such as A Star Is Born (1954) and Oklahoma! (1955), massive biblical epics such as Ben-Hur (1959), and adventures such as Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) became the mainstay of the American screen.
In the early 1950s a motion-picture novelty known as 3-D (for three-dimensional) appeared. Two cameras would film the same scene from slightly different angles. Through the use of polarized eyeglasses, viewers could see only one picture with each eye, producing a three-dimensional effect. However, the glasses were not popular with the public, the images on the screen were not very sharp, and the films themselves were not very good. After enjoying a brief vogue in films such as House of Wax (1953), the novelty of 3-D wore off, and the films were rereleased in conventional two-dimensional form.
Despite the success of wide-screen spectaculars, the popularity and influence of Hollywood declined steadily throughout the 1950s and 1960s. A series of antitrust suits forced major studios to divest themselves of their affiliate theaters and other holdings, and films began to be sold competitively in an open market. The star system, through which studios spent millions of dollars on their rosters of personalities, was at an end. Performers, free to operate independently of studios, began to command high salaries and a percentage of the gross income of their films. By 1959, production in the United States had dropped to 250 films a year, half of what it had been during the war years. European and Asian films, once confined to art houses, became a staple of American viewing. In 1946 there were less than a dozen art theaters in the United States; in 1960 more than a thousand were in operation. Film festivals began to be held throughout the world, displaying the work of directors whose films had never been shown outside their own countries before the 1950s.
In the late 1940s Italian motion pictures experienced a rebirth with the rise of neorealism, a cinematic movement that captured worldwide attention and introduced several major Italian filmmakers. The movement was characterized by films of an intense, almost overbearing realism, set against natural backgrounds and featuring nonprofessional actors. Neorealism was launched by director Roberto Rossellini in Open City (1945), which achieved an intimacy and depth of emotion new to the screen in its depiction of the Nazi occupation of Rome and the resistance of the city's people. The films of actor-director Vittorio De Sica, especially The Bicycle Thief (1949), shot entirely on the streets of Milan, captured the grim social realities of postwar Italy and became internationally known. Other filmmakers trained in neorealism went on to build strong worldwide reputations in their own individual styles. Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1966) in stark neorealist tradition. La Strada (1954), by Federico Fellini, a realistic study of circus performers and misfits, led its director to an acclaimed portrait of decadent Italian society in La Dolce Vita (1960) and, later, to perhaps excessively personal and fantastic imagery in 8 1/2 (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965). One of the most widely discussed filmmakers of the 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni, emerged from the neorealist movement. Antonioni's L'Avventura (1959) and Red Desert (1964) are moody, barren studies of lost characters in a modern, complex world. Both Antonioni's Red Desert and Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits show a remarkable use of color by directors who usually worked in black and white. Italian filmmakers have continued to manifest a strong social and political consciousness, as evidenced by the films of Bernardo Bertolucci, such as The Conformist (1970) and 1900 (1977), and by Swept Away (1975) and Seven Beauties (1976), by Lina Wertmuller.
Room at the Top (1959), directed by Jack Clayton, inaugurated a series of realistic films about English working-class life produced in England in the 1960s. Films such as A Taste of Honey (1962), by Tony Richardson, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), by Karel Reisz, coincided with an intense American interest in English fashion and culture. The popular singing group the Beatles appeared in A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), which were especially well-received in the United States, as were such English stars as Julie Christie, Albert Finney, Glenda Jackson, Peter O'Toole, and Vanessa Redgrave. In 1966 Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, working in England, produced his most commercial film, Blow-Up, about a photographer who accidentally captures a crime on film. English director John Schlesinger filmed Midnight Cowboy in New York City in 1969, displaying a keen awareness of the decaying American dream. Both films were extremely popular, crossing over from the art-theater market to general theaters. The same pattern continued in subsequent decades, as talented British directors emerged and were warmly welcomed by American audiences. Filmmakers whose work found favor with a broad public include Scottish director Bill Forsythe (Local Hero, 1983); Irish directors Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father, 1993) and Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, 1992); and English directors Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette, 1985; Dangerous Liaisons, 1988; The Grifters, 1991), Kenneth Branagh (Henry V, 1989), Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, 1989), and Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, 1994).
In 1951 Japanese director Akira Kurosawa won the grand prize at the Venice International Film Festival with his Rashomon, introducing the strong national cinema of Japan to Western audiences. Kurosawa's films The Seven Samurai (1954) and Throne of Blood (1957), known as "eastern westerns," served as models for several American films, notably The Magnificent Seven (1960), which was patterned on The Seven Samurai. The films of Mizoguchi Kenji and Kinugasa Teinosuke are handsomely produced, beautifully photographed dramas marked by a unique use of color. Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953) is a costume legend of 16th-century Japan, and Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (1954) is a lavish 12th-century tale of family honor; both films are mature, philosophical works of great intellectual and visual power. These were not the first significant Japanese motion pictures, only the first to gain recognition outside Japan. Although largely confined to the art-house market today, boldly creative Japanese films continue to be produced. Kurosawa remained active into his 80s, filming Akira Kurosawa's Dreams in 1990. Younger directors such as Sogo Ishii, Juzo Itami (Tampopo, 1986), and Takehiro Nakajima began to make their mark as well. The popular Japanese genre of animation has continued to thrive, producing sophisticated feature-length films, such as Akira (1988), that have been well received worldwide. Similarly, the film industry of India, vigorous and productive for many years, received international attention in 1955 through the work of director Satyajit Ray, whose Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955), Aparajito (Unvanquished, 1956), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959) form the Apu trilogy, tracing the growth of a young boy to manhood. Ray's son Sandip, Ketan Mehta, and other capable directors continue to develop Indian cinema.
One of the most distinctive and original directors to emerge in the post-World War II international climate was Sweden's Ingmar Bergman, who brought an intense philosophical and intellectual depth to his films. In treating problems of human isolation, sexual conflicts, and religious obsession, he became the dominant influence in Swedish cinema and a key writer-director in the history of world cinema. In his film The Seventh Seal (1956) he probed the mysteries of life and morality through the trials of a medieval knight playing a game of chess with Death. In Wild Strawberries (1957) he created a series of poetic flashbacks reviewing the life of an elderly professor, played with dignity by Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjöstrom. Bergman skillfully and vividly dissected the human experience in a series of films examining the search for both love and the meaning of life by a group of complex, articulate characters. Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972), Scenes from a Marriage (1973), and Autumn Sonata (1978) portray love/hate relationships imbued with a consciousness of the religious themes running through the lives of the characters. Bergman's career has flourished for more than three decades with an almost unbroken stream of significant, creative works that display remarkable visual style and composition coupled with a unique energy and intelligence.
The Spanish director Luis Buñuel was a leading figure in early European avant-garde cinema, renowned for his collaboration with Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí on Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L'Age d'Or (1930), extended metaphors in surrealism that caused shock and outrage because of their audacious imagery and strong anti-Roman Catholicism. Buñuel came to worldwide attention as a master filmmaker in the 1960s, creating a series of films in which he explored the inability of characters to come to terms with their own human nature. His film Viridiana (1961), banned in Spain, tells the tale of a young novitiate who is raped and corrupted by thieves and blasphemers before taking her vows, drawing a parallel between sexual fetishism and religion. Such themes are also raised in his films Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), Belle de Jour (1967), and Tristana (1970). Buñuel's films, sometimes starkly realistic in style, are also charming and witty on occasion in their commentary on the nature of the civilized world. In The Exterminating Angel (1962) guests at a dinner party find that they are unable to leave the table. During a formal supper in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), a curtain rises and the diners find that they are onstage before an audience. Buñuel's idea that human beings seek to deny their animal nature through the creation of civilized codes and manners is humorously tested in his work through the breaking down of order, leaving his characters in absurd situations. Because of his anti-Fascist attitudes and strong anti-Roman Catholic politics, Buñuel fled Spain in the early 1960s to work in France and Mexico.
France continued to dominate the world art-film market throughout the 1950s and 1960s, producing fiercely independent filmmakers who experimented in many diverse styles of expression. The light-headed, highly personal comedies of Jacques Tati, such as M. Hulot's Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958), revived pantomime humor and became widely successful. Equally impressive to art-film critics, although not popular commercially, were the films of Robert Bresson, notably Diary of a Country Priest (1950) and The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962). Bresson's films are introspective and austere, simply photographed on a small budget. He took a sharp, detached view of the world, often working almost totally in medium shots, which give his films a literary or theatrical quality. In the late 1950s a group of highly creative young filmmakers launched a movement known as the nouvelle vague (new wave), which was influenced strongly by Hollywood genre movies, especially the antihero film noir output of the 1940s and early 1950s, and by the work of American directors Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford. The movement was also influenced by Italian neorealism. Nouvelle vague filmmakers expressed their views on the state of the art in the French periodical Cahiers du Cinéma, in which they proposed the auteur theory of filmmaking: The director is the sole author of a film, and, despite studio pressure or influences from the industry itself, a film bears the individual stamp of the director's personality. The new-wave reshaping of French art cinema was a distinctive mix of Gallic sensibilities, docurealist photography, and quotations from, or homages to, Hollywood films. The first proponents of the nouvelle vague made films about modern French life in individual styles, each from a unique perspective. François Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais all made their first important features in 1958 and 1959. Truffaut, a former film critic particularly enamored of the work of Alfred Hitchcock, became known for his gentle, realistic, autobiographical portraits of a character named Antoine Doinel, whose life he charted in 400 Blows (1959), Love at Twenty (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), and Love on the Run (1979). Truffaut explored the theme of freedom versus involvement in a restrictive society in these films and in others, such as his enormously popular Jules and Jim (1961) and Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Throughout his career, Truffaut continued to make films of rare beauty and charm, such as his deliberately old-fashioned and simply told The Wild Child (1970), about the civilizing of a young boy who had been raised by wolves. The films of Resnais, especially Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), are paradigms of intimacy, portraying life as a struggle between emotional distance and involvement with others, with distance almost always the victor. Using stylistic and intellectual abstractions and intentionally distorted editing techniques, Resnais raised questions about the quality and effect of time and memory and their relationship to human emotion. The most radically experimental of the nouvelle vague directors was Jean Luc Godard, whose first feature, Breathless (1959), starring Jean Paul Belmondo, is a highly successful homage to the American gangster film. Godard's subject matter shows great diversity, ranging from a series of autobiographical portraits of his then wife, actor Anna Karina-notably Vivre Sa Vie (1962)-to the sexual and political comedy of Masculin-Féminin (1966). Godard played with time and space, moving his camera freely and allowing his actors to improvise at will. His film Weekend (1968) is a bitter study of modern life, in which the victims of an automobile accident wander the highways, discussing the nature of their lives with literary and cinematic figures who appear mysteriously to connect the past, present, and future. After Weekend, Godard's films became significantly less accessible to commercial audiences, moving toward political tracts, as in the pedagogic Tout Va Bien (1972), which stars American actor Jane Fonda.
A diverse group of filmmakers emerged in the Federal Republic of Germany during the mid-1970s. Despite their different approaches, they shared a critical stance on the quality of life in modern Germany and a flat rejection of complacent bourgeois materialism. Werner Herzog's films are characterized by unusual, overwhelming landscapes and characters and are often made under dangerous or difficult conditions. His best-known film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), tells of a 16th-century Spanish expedition to the Peruvian jungle during which a power-hungry Aguirre plans to claim an entire continent. Director Wim Wenders deals with themes of alienation and self-realization, as in his Kings of the Road (1976), Paris, Texas (1984), and Wings of Desire (1988); many of his films also show a fascination with American culture. The most prolific and unpredictable of these filmmakers, credited with restoring German cinema to parity with France and Italy, was Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He made 41 feature films in 12 years. A young graduate of radical theater groups, Fassbinder worked at bridging the gap between film as a personal manifesto and film as a popular art in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1978), and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). All three films are built around themes of alienation, consumerism, economic inequality, and political oppression.
After decades of dormancy, a strong national cinema emerged in Australia at the beginning of the 1970s. Previously, films by non-Australians were shot on Australian locations with foreign financing for distribution in the United States; noteworthy examples include Outback (1971), by Ted Kotcheff, and Walkabout (1971), by Nicolas Roeg. Indigenous Australian films began to attract international interest with Peter Weir's chillers Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1978). Weir and filmmakers Bruce Beresford and Gillian Armstrong show a strong sense of national identity. Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock re-creates an incident in 1900 in which a group of schoolgirls disappeared unaccountably from a picnic in the outback. Beresford's The Getting of Wisdom (1977) focuses on life in a Victorian girls' school, and his Breaker Morant (1980) is the true story of three Australian soldiers in the Boer War, court-martialed by the British Army for the murder of Boer prisoners. Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979) recounts the early life of a feminist writer at the turn of the century; her High Tide (1987) is an intense portrayal of a woman reunited with the daughter she had long ago abandoned. The work of Weir, Beresford, and Armstrong at first reached primarily an art-house audience, but a number of other Australian films were successful in mainstream theaters, including George Miller's Mad Max (1979) and its several sequels, Miller's The Man From Snowy River (1982), and Peter Faiman's Crocodile Dundee (1986) and its sequel (1988). Soon, Australian directors were working increasingly with Hollywood, and eventually several-such as Beresford and Weir (whose last Australian production, The Year of Living Dangerously, was in 1983)-were virtually absorbed by the American film industry. Among those who continued to work in Australia were Armstrong (The Last Days of Chez Nous, 1993), Paul Cox (Man of Flowers, 1984), and John Duigan (Sirens, 1994). New Zealand also began to develop a thriving film industry in the 1970s. New Zealand films garnered attention abroad as early as 1977 with Sleeping Dogs, by Roger Donaldson, whose Smash Palace followed in 1982. Other notable New Zealand filmmakers include Vincent Ward (The Navigator, 1988; Map of the Human Heart, 1993) and Jane Campion, whose films An Angel at My Table (1990) and The Piano (1993) were internationally acclaimed.
The impact on American filmmakers of European developments and the further decline of the studio system coalesced to change the character of American cinema during the 1960s and 1970s.
By the end of the 1960s, the original function of the motion-picture studios had been taken over by investors from outside the industry, and many studios were bought by large conglomerates. The early studios were primarily in the business of making movies for profit. The new conglomerates, however, whose businesses were usually unrelated to movies, were often interested in films only as a sound investment. Those studios still operating relatively independently in the 1960s produced lavish adaptations of Broadway musicals or comedies. In 1968, censorship laws were relaxed in favor of a rating system that allowed films to address any type of subject matter, a change that in turn permitted Hollywood to begin producing films featuring extreme violence and explicit portrayals of sexual relationships.
At the same time, American cinema saw the rise of a new generation of gifted filmmakers who had been influenced by trends in Europe and were willing to work with different distributors on a film-by-film basis. Many of these directors produced significant work of lasting quality, both on the fringes of the newly decentralized industry and within its boundaries. Some of them, including Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Arthur Penn, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, consistently managed to work with company financing, either by securing release and distribution from a different studio for each project or by developing relatively stable relationships with particular studios. Other directors, including Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, and John Sayles, often circumvented established channels but occasionally achieved commercial success that financed their subsequent work. Kubrick produced a steady stream of interesting work, including the scathing political satire of Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), the technical wizardry of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the meticulous 18th-century period detail of his adaptation of a novel by English writer William Makepeace Thackeray, Barry Lyndon (1975), and the Gothic horror of The Shining (1980). Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) drew art-house audiences and fans of violence and adventure, serving as the starting point for the so-called youth generation films, along with The Graduate (1967), by Mike Nichols, and Easy Rider (1969), by Dennis Hopper. Penn continued to make films that spoke to the counterculture of the 1960s, including Alice's Restaurant (1969) and Four Friends (1981). After achieving early success as a comedy writer and standup comic, Woody Allen directed a series of comedies that zero in on New York City sensibilities, such as Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), and Sleeper (1973). His later works, including Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Alice (1990), and Husbands and Wives (1992), blend comedy with serious musings on love, death, and personal responsibility. He seemed to return to his earlier focus on entertainment with Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) and Bullets Over Broadway (1994). Francis Ford Coppola made You're a Big Boy Now (1966) as part of his film school master's thesis at the University of California at Los Angeles. He subsequently directed The Conversation (1974), a Watergate-era drama about wiretapping (see Watergate); Apocalypse Now (1979), which adapts the short story "Heart of Darkness," by Joseph Conrad, to paint a disturbing portrait of the Vietnam War; and the three-part Godfather saga (1972; 1974; 1990), widely acclaimed as an epic vision of an Italian-American family involved in organized crime. Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) and GoodFellas (1990) also deal with crime and the Italian-American experience; his other films include Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), the latter based on the controversial novel by Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis. Robert Altman's film M*A*S*H (1970) was a commercial success and became a popular, long-running television series. He subsequently directed a series of films that received limited mass-audience backing, with the notable exception of his kaleidoscopic Nashville (1975), which features 26 leading roles and weaves an American tapestry of music, drama, politics, and religion; The Player (1992), a harsh comedy/mystery about the Hollywood film industry; and Ready to Wear (Pret à Porter), a slickly satirical depiction of the world of high fashion, released in 1994. John Cassavetes, an actor-director whose first feature film was the experimental Shadows (1959), moved into the mainstream for a time after his commercial success with Faces (1968) and again with A Woman Under the Influence (1974), starring his wife, Gena Rowlands. The independent actor-writer-director John Sayles won critical acclaim for films such as Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), Matewan (1987), and Passionfish (1992). Spike Lee, who wrote, directed, produced, and starred in such critically and commercially successful films as Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991), blazed a trail for a new generation of African-American filmmakers.
Among the most popular American films of the 1970s and 1980s were escapist epics featuring dazzling stunts and special effects. These big-budget blockbusters included disaster films such as The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974); comic-strip fantasies such as Superman (1978) and Batman (1989) and their repective sequels; and the Star Trek films (the first in 1979), based on the 1960s television series. Star Wars (1977), a space adventure directed by George Lucas, grossed more than $200 million and became the envy of the industry; its sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) were equally ambitious. Director Steven Spielberg proved a master at captivating the popular imagination. His Jaws (1975), about a killer shark that terrorizes a small beach community, became the model for a number of films in which fear-inspiring creatures threaten helpless victims. Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. (1982) capitalized on a widespread fascination with the possibility of extraterrestrial life. His other multimillion-dollar blockbusters include Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), all based on the serial cliffhangers of the 1930s. Most of Spielberg's films rely heavily on high-tech special effects, especially his Jurassic Park (1993), which features frighteningly realistic computer-generated dinosaurs. Within the first four weeks of its release, Jurassic Park became the highest-grossing film up to that time. The skyrocketing costs of big-budget epics drove several studios into bankruptcy and forced others to produce only two or three pictures per year. More intimate films, such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Ordinary People (1980), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and The Remains of the Day (1993), continued to be made, but were often considered gambles by their distributors.
The 1980s also saw a revolution in the home-video market, through which major releases were made available for home viewing almost immediately after they left theaters. This development, combined with the advent of cable television, which featured relatively current films on special channels, seemed to threaten the long-term survival of movie theaters and created a climate similar to that of the early 1950s, when television began to challenge the popularity of motion pictures. As a result, film companies increasingly favored large spectacles with fantastic special effects in order to lure the public away from home videos and back to the big screen.
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