NAKARAJAN: HOLLYWOOD HISTORY AND WORLD CINEMA FROM 1910 ONWARDS

HOLLYWOOD HISTORY AND WORLD CINEMA FROM 1910 ONWARDS

The Silent Years, 1910–27

Pre-World War I American cinema

Multiple-reel films had appeared in the United States as early as 1907, when Adolph Zukor distributed Pathé’s three-reel Passion Play, but when Vitagraph produced the five-reel The Life of Moses in 1909, the MPPC forced it to be released in serial fashion at the rate of one reel a week. The multiple-reel film—which came to be called a “feature,” in the vaudevillian sense of a headline attraction—achieved general acceptance with the smashing success of the three-and-one-half-reel Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth (Queen Elizabeth, 1912), which starred Sarah Bernhardt and was imported by Zukor (who founded the independent Famous Players production company with its profits). In 1912 Enrico Guazzoni’s nine-reel Italian superspectacle Quo Vadis? (“Whither Are You Going?”) was road-shown in legitimate theatres across the country at a top admission price of one dollar, and the feature craze was on.

Queen Elizabeth

A scene from Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth (1912; also called Queen Elizabeth).

Jimmy Doyle and Harland Dixon

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At first there were difficulties in distributing features, because the exchanges associated with both the MPPC and the independents were geared toward cheaply made one-reel shorts. Because of their more elaborate production values, features had relatively higher negative costs. This was a disadvantage to distributors, who charged a uniform price per foot. By 1914, however, several national feature-distribution alliances that correlated pricing with a film’s negative cost and box-office receipts were organized. These new exchanges demonstrated the economic advantage of multiple-reel films over shorts. Exhibitors quickly learned that features could command higher admission prices and longer runs; single-title packages were also cheaper and easier to advertise than programs of multiple titles. As for manufacturing, producers found that the higher expenditure for features was readily amortized by high volume sales to distributors, who in turn were eager to share in the higher admission returns from the theatres. The whole industry soon reorganized itself around the economics of the multiple-reel film, and the effects of this restructuring did much to give movies their characteristic modern form.

Feature films made motion pictures respectable for the middle class by providing a format that was analogous to that of the legitimate theatre and was suitable for the adaptation of middle-class novels and plays. This new audience had more demanding standards than the older working-class one, and producers readily increased their budgets to provide high technical quality and elaborate productions. The new viewers also had a more refined sense of comfort, which exhibitors quickly accommodated by replacing their storefronts with large, elegantly appointed new theatres in the major urban centres (one of the first was Mitchell L. Marks’s 3,300-seat Strand, which opened in the Broadway district of Manhattan in 1914). Known as “dream palaces” because of the fantastic luxuriance of their interiors, these houses had to show features rather than a program of shorts to attract large audiences at premium prices. By 1916 there were more than 21,000 movie theatres in the United States. Their advent marked the end of the nickelodeon era and foretold the rise of the Hollywood studio system, which dominated urban exhibition from the 1920s to the ’50s. Before the new studio-based monopoly could be established, however, the patents-based monopoly of the MPPC had to expire, and this it did about 1914 as a result of its own basic assumptions.

As conceived by Edison, the basic operating principle of the Trust was to control the industry through patents pooling and licensing, an idea logical enough in theory but difficult to practice in the context of a dynamically changing marketplace. Specifically, the Trust’s failure to anticipate the independents’ widespread and aggressive resistance to its policies cost it a fortune in patent-infringement litigation. Furthermore, the Trust badly underestimated the importance of the feature film, permitting the independents to claim this popular new product as entirely their own. Another issue that the MPPC misjudged was the power of the marketing strategy known as the “star system.” Borrowed from the theatre industry, this system involves the creation and management of publicity about key performers, or stars, to stimulate demand for their films. Trust company producers used this kind of publicity after 1910, when Carl Laemmle of Independent Motion Pictures (IMP) promoted Florence Lawrence into national stardom through a series of media stunts in St. Louis, Missouri, but they never exploited the technique as forcefully or as imaginatively as the independents did. Finally, and most decisively, in August 1912 the U.S. Justice Department brought suit against the MPPC for “restraint of trade” in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Delayed by countersuits and by World War I, the government’s case was eventually won, and the MPPC formally dissolved in 1918, although it had been functionally inoperative since 1914.

The rise and fall of the MPPC was concurrent with the industry’s move to southern California. As a result of the nickelodeon boom, some exhibitors—who showed three separate programs over a seven-day period—had begun to require as many as 20 new films per week, and it became necessary to put production on a systematic year-round schedule. Because most films were still shot outdoors in available light, such schedules could not be maintained in the vicinity of New York City or Chicago, where the industry had originally located itself in order to take advantage of trained theatrical labour pools. As early as 1907, production companies, such as Selig Polyscope, began to dispatch production units to warmer climates during winter. It was soon clear that what producers required was a new industrial centre—one with warm weather, a temperate climate, a variety of scenery, and other qualities (such as access to acting talent) essential to their highly unconventional form of manufacturing.

Various companies experimented with location shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, in San Antonio, Texas, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and even in Cuba, but the ultimate site of the American film industry was a Los Angeles suburb (originally a small industrial town) called Hollywood. It is generally thought that Hollywood’s distance from the MPPC’s headquarters in New York City made it attractive to the independents, but MPPC members such as Selig, Kalem, Biograph, and Essanay had also established facilities there by 1911 in response to a number of the region’s attractions. These included the temperate climate required for year-round production (the U.S. Weather Bureau estimated that an average of 320 days per year were sunny or clear); a wide range of topography within a 50-mile (80-km) radius of Hollywood, including mountains, valleys, forests, lakes, islands, seacoast, and desert; the status of Los Angeles as a professional theatrical centre; the existence of a low tax base; and the presence of cheap and plentiful labour and land. This latter factor enabled the newly arrived production companies to buy up tens of thousands of acres of prime real estate on which to locate their studios, standing sets, and backlots.

By 1915 approximately 15,000 workers were employed by the motion-picture industry in Hollywood, and more than 60 percent of American production was centred there. In that same year the trade journal Variety reported that capital investment in American motion pictures—the business of artisanal craftsmen and fairground operators only a decade before—had exceeded $500 million. The most powerful companies in the new film capital were the independents, who were flush with cash from their conversion to feature production. These included the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation (later Paramount Pictures, c. 1927), which was formed by a merger of Zukor’s Famous Players Company, Jesse L. Lasky’s Feature Play Company, and the Paramount distribution exchange in 1916; Universal Pictures, founded by Carl Laemmle in 1912 by merging IMP with Powers, Rex, Nestor, Champion, and Bison; Goldwyn Picture Corporation, founded in 1916 by Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) and Edgar Selwyn; Metro Picture Corporation and Louis B. Mayer Pictures, founded by Louis B. Mayer in 1915 and 1917, respectively; and the Fox Film Corporation (later Twentieth Century–Fox, 1935), founded by William Fox in 1915. After World War I these companies were joined by Loew’s, Inc. (parent corporation of MGM, created by the merger of Metro, Goldwyn, and Mayer companies cited above, 1924), a national exhibition chain organized by Marcus Loew and Nicholas Schenck in 1919; First National Pictures, Inc., a circuit of independent exhibitors who established their own production facilities in Burbank, California, in 1922; Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc., founded by Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack Warner in 1923; and Columbia Pictures, Inc., incorporated in 1924 by Harry Cohn and Jack Cohn.

These organizations became the backbone of the Hollywood studio system, and the men who controlled them shared several important traits. They were all independent exhibitors and distributors who had outwitted the Trust and earned their success by manipulating finances in the postnickelodeon feature boom, merging production companies, organizing national distribution networks, and ultimately acquiring vast theatre chains. They saw their business as basically a retailing operation modeled on the practice of chain stores such as Woolworth’s and Sears. Not incidentally, these men were all first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, most of them with little formal education, while the audience they served was 90 percent Protestant and Catholic. This circumstance would become an issue during the 1920s, when the movies became a mass medium that was part of the life of every U.S. citizen and when Hollywood became the chief purveyor of American culture to the world.

Pre-World War I European cinema

Before World War I, European cinema was dominated by France and Italy. At Pathé Frères, director general Ferdinand Zecca perfected the course comique, a uniquely Gallic version of the chase film, which inspired Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops, while the immensely popular Max Linder created a comic persona that would deeply influence the work of Charlie Chaplin. The episodic crime film was pioneered by Victorin Jasset in the Nick Carter series, produced for the small Éclair Company, but it remained for Gaumont’s Louis Feuillade to bring the genre to aesthetic perfection in the extremely successful serials Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915–16), and Judex (1916).

Another influential phenomenon initiated in prewar France was the film d’art movement. It began with L’Assassinat du duc de Guise (“The Assassination of the Duke of Guise,” 1908), directed by Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes of the Comédie Française for the Société Film d’Art, which was formed for the express purpose of transferring prestigious stage plays starring famous performers to the screen. L’Assassinat’s success inspired other companies to make similar films, which came to be known as films d’art. These films were long on intellectual pedigree and short on narrative sophistication. The directors simply filmed theatrical productions in toto, without adaptation. Their brief popularity nevertheless created a context for the lengthy treatment of serious material in motion pictures and was directly instrumental in the rise of the feature.

No country, however, was more responsible for the popularity of the feature than Italy. The Italian cinema’s lavishly produced costume spectacles brought it international prominence in the years before the war. The prototypes of the genre, by virtue of their epic material and length, were the Cines company’s six-reel Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompei), directed by Luigi Maggi in 1908, and its 10-reel remake, directed by Ernesto Pasquali in 1913; but it was Cines’s nine-reel Quo Vadis? (“Whither Are You Going?,” 1912), with its huge three-dimensional sets re-creating ancient Rome and its 5,000 extras, that established the standard for the superspectacle and briefly conquered the world market for Italian motion pictures. Its successor, the Italia company’s 12-reel Cabiria (1914), was even more extravagant in its historical reconstruction of the Second Punic War, from the burning of the Roman fleet at Syracuse to Hannibal crossing the Alps and the sack of Carthage. The Italian superspectacle stimulated public demand for features and influenced such important directors as Cecil B. DeMille, Ernst Lubitsch, and especially D.W. Griffith.

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D.W. Griffith

There has been a tendency in modern film scholarship to view the narrative form of motion pictures as a development of an overall production system. Although narrative film was and continues to be strongly influenced by a combination of economic, technological, and social factors, it also owes a great deal to the individual artists who viewed film as a medium of personal expression. Chief among these innovators was D.W. Griffith. It is true that Griffith’s self-cultivated reputation as a Romantic artist—“the father of film technique,” “the man who invented Hollywood,” “the Shakespeare of the screen,” and the like—is somewhat overblown. It is also true that by 1908 film narrative had already been systematically organized to accommodate the material conditions of production. Griffith’s work nevertheless transformed that system from its primitive to its classical mode. He was the first filmmaker to realize that the motion-picture medium, properly vested with technical vitality and seriousness of theme, could exercise enormous persuasive power over an audience, or even a nation, without recourse to print or human speech.

D.W. Griffith

D.W. Griffith.

Wide World Photos

Griffith began his film career in late 1907 as an actor. He was cast as the lead in the Edison Company’s Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (1907) and also appeared in many Biograph films. He had already attempted to make a living as a stage actor and a playwright without much success, and his real goal in approaching the film companies seems to have been to sell them scripts. In June 1908 Biograph gave him an opportunity to replace its ailing director, George (“Old Man”) McCutcheon, on the chase film The Adventures of Dollie. With the advice of the company’s two cameramen, Billy Bitzer (who would become Griffith’s personal cinematographer for much of his career) and Arthur Marvin (who actually shot the film), Griffith turned in a fresh and exciting film. His work earned him a full-time director’s contract with Biograph, for whom he directed more than 450 one- and two-reel films over the next five years.

In the Biograph films, Griffith experimented with all the narrative techniques he would later use in the epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)—techniques that helped to formulate and stabilize Hollywood’s classical narrative style. A few of these techniques were already in use when Griffith started; he simply refined them. Others were innovations Griffith devised to solve practical problems in the course of production. Still others resulted from his conscious analogy between film and literary narrative, chiefly Victorian novels and plays. In all cases, however, Griffith brought to the practice of filmmaking a seriousness of purpose and an intensity of vision that, combined with his intuitive mastery of film technique, made him the first great artist of the cinema.

Griffith’s first experiments were in the field of editing and involved varying the standard distance between the audience and the screen. In Greaser’s Gauntlet, made one month after Dollie, he first used a cut-in from a long shot to a full shot to heighten the emotional intensity of a scene. In an elaboration of this practice, he was soon taking shots from multiple camera setups—long shots, full shots, medium shots, close shots, and, ultimately, close-ups—and combining their separate perspectives into single dramatic scenes. By October 1908 Griffith was practicing parallel editing between the dual narratives of After Many Years, and the following year he extended the technique to the representation of three simultaneous actions in The Lonely Villa, cutting rapidly back and forth between a band of robbers breaking into a suburban villa, a woman and her children barricaded within, and the husband rushing from town to the rescue. This type of crosscutting, or intercutting, came to be known as the “Griffith last-minute rescue” and was employed as a basic structural principle in both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. It not only employed the rapid alternation of shots but also called for the shots themselves to be held for shorter and shorter durations as the parallel lines of action converged; in its ability to create the illusion of simultaneous actions, the intercut chase sequence prefigured Soviet theories of montage by at least a decade, and it remains a basic component of narrative film form to this day.

Another area of experiment for Griffith involved camera movement and placement, most of which had been purely functional before him. When Biograph started sending his production unit to southern California in 1910, Griffith began to practice panoramic panning shots not only to provide visual information but also to engage his audience in the total environment of his films. Later he would prominently employ the tracking, or traveling, shot, in which the camera—and therefore the audience—participates in the dramatic action by moving with it. In California, Griffith discovered that camera angle could be used to comment upon the content of a shot or to heighten its dramatic emphasis in a way that the conventionally mandated head-on medium shot could not; and, at a time when convention dictated the flat and uniform illumination of every element in a scene, he pioneered the use of expressive lighting to create mood and atmosphere. Like so many of the other devices he brought into general use, these had all been employed by earlier directors, but Griffith was the first to practice them with the care of an artist and to rationalize them within the overall structure of his films.

Griffith’s one-reelers grew increasingly complex between 1911 and 1912, and he began to realize that only a longer and more expansive format could contain his vision. At first he made such two-reel films as Enoch Arden (1911), Man’s Genesis (1912), The Massacre (1912), and The Mothering Heart (1913), but these went virtually unnoticed by a public enthralled with such recent features from Europe as Queen Elizabeth and Quo Vadis? Finally Griffith determined to make an epic himself, based on the story of Judith and Holofernes from the Apocrypha. The result was the four-reel Judith of Bethulia (1913), filmed secretly on a 12-square-mile (31-square-km) set in Chatsworth Park, California. In addition to its structurally complicated narrative, Judith contained massive sets and battle scenes unlike anything yet attempted in American film. It cost twice the amount Biograph had allocated for its budget. Company officials, stunned at Griffith’s audacity and extravagance, tried to relieve the director of his creative responsibilities by promoting him to studio production chief. Griffith quit instead, publishing a full-page advertisement in The New York Dramatic Mirror (December 3, 1913), in which he took credit for all the Biograph films he had made from The Adventures of Dollie through Judith, as well as for the narrative innovations they contained. He then accepted an offer from Harry E. Aitken, the president of the recently formed Mutual Film Corporation, to head the feature production company Reliance-Majestic; he took Bitzer and most of his Biograph stock company with him.

As part of his new contract, Griffith was allowed to make two independent features per year, and for his first project he chose to adapt The Clansman, a novel about the American Civil War and Reconstruction by the Southern clergyman Thomas Dixon, Jr. (As a Kentuckian whose father had served as a Confederate officer, Griffith was deeply sympathetic to the material, which was highly sensational in its depiction of Reconstruction as a period in which mulatto carpetbaggers and their Black henchmen had destroyed the social fabric of the South and given birth to a heroic Ku Klux Klan.) Shooting on the film began in secrecy in late 1914. Although a script existed, Griffith kept most of the continuity in his head—a remarkable feat considering that the completed film contained 1,544 separate shots at a time when the most elaborate of foreign spectacles boasted fewer than 100. When the film opened in March 1915, retitled The Birth of a Nation, it was immediately pronounced “epoch-making” and recognized as a remarkable artistic achievement. The complexity of its narrative and the epic sweep of its subject were unprecedented, but so too were its controversial manipulations of audience response, especially its blatant appeals to racism. Despite its brilliantly conceived battle sequences, its tender domestic scenes, and its dignified historical reconstructions, the film provoked fear and disgust with its shocking images of miscegenation and racial violence. As the film’s popularity swept the nation, denunciations followed, and many who had originally praised it, such as President Woodrow Wilson, were forced to recant. Ultimately, after screenings of The Birth of a Nation had caused riots in several cities, it was banned in eight Northern and Midwestern states. (First Amendment protection was not extended to motion pictures in the United States until 1952.) Such measures, however, did not prevent The Birth of a Nation from becoming the single most popular film in history throughout much of the 20th century; it achieved national distribution in the year of its release and was seen by nearly three million people.

scene from The Birth of a Nation

Scene from The Birth of a Nation (1915), directed by D.W. Griffith.

David W. Griffith Corporation

Taking the lead in protesting against The Birth of a Nation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded six years prior to the film’s release, used the struggle as an organizing tool. The powerful impact of Griffith’s film meanwhile persuaded many Black leaders that racial stereotyping in motion pictures could be more effectively challenged if African American filmmakers produced works more accurately and fairly depicting Black life. For their first effort, The Birth of a Race (1919), Black sponsors sought collaboration with white producers but lost control of the project, which was judged a failure. Other aspiring African American filmmakers took note of the film’s problems and began to make their own works independently. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company (run by George P. Johnson and Noble Johnson) and the writer and entrepreneur Oscar Micheaux were among those who launched what became known as the genre of “race pictures,” produced in and for the Black community.

Although it is difficult to believe that the racism of The Birth of a Nation was unconscious, as some have claimed, it is easy to imagine that Griffith had not anticipated the power of his own images. He seems to have been genuinely stunned by the hostile public reaction to his masterpiece, and he fought back by publishing a pamphlet entitled The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America (1915), which vilified the practice of censorship and especially intolerance. At the height of his notoriety and fame, Griffith decided to produce a spectacular cinematic polemic against what he saw as a flaw in human character that had endangered civilization throughout history. The result was the massive epic Intolerance (1916), which interweaves stories of martyrdom from four separate historical periods. The film was conceived on a scale so monumental that it dwarfed all its predecessors. Crosscutting freely between a contemporary tale of courtroom injustice, the fall of ancient Babylon to Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in 16th-century France, and the Crucifixion of Christ, Griffith created an editing structure so abstract that contemporary audiences could not understand it. Even the extravagant sets and exciting battle sequences could not save Intolerance at the box office. To reduce his losses, Griffith withdrew the film from distribution after 22 weeks; he subsequently cut into the negative and released the modern and the Babylonian stories as two separate features, The Mother and the Law and The Fall of Babylon, in 1919. (Although ignored by Americans, Intolerance was both popular and vastly influential in the Soviet Union, where filmmakers minutely analyzed Griffith’s editing style and techniques.)

scene from Intolerance

The temple of Babylon sequence from Intolerance (1916), directed by D.W. Griffith.

Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York

It would be fair to say that Griffith’s career as an innovator of film form ended with Intolerance, but his career as a film artist certainly did not. He went on to direct another 26 features between 1916 and 1931, chief among them the World War I anti-German propaganda epic (financed in part by the British government) Hearts of the World (1918), the subtle and lyrical Broken Blossoms (1919), and the rousing melodrama Way Down East (1920). The financial success of the latter made it possible for Griffith to establish his own studio at Mamaroneck, New York, where he produced the epics Orphans of the Storm (1921) and America (1924), which focused on the French and American revolutions, respectively; both lost money. Griffith’s next feature was the independent semidocumentary Isn’t Life Wonderful? (1925), which was shot on location in Germany and is thought to have influenced both the “street” films of the German director G.W. Pabst and the post-World War II Italian Neorealist movement.

Griffith’s last films, with the exception of The Struggle (1931), were all made for other producers. Not one could be called a success, although his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln (1930), was recognized as an effective essay in the new medium. The critical and financial failure of The Struggle, however, a version of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (The Drunkard), forced Griffith to retire.

It might be said of Griffith that, like Georges Méliès and Edwin S. Porter, he outlived his genius, but that is not true. Griffith was fundamentally a 19th-century man who became one of the 20th-century’s greatest artists. Transcending personal defects of vision, judgment, and taste, he developed the narrative language of film. Later filmmakers adapted his techniques and structures to new themes and styles, while for Griffith his innovations were inextricably linked to a social vision that became obsolete while he was still in the prime of his working life.

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Post-World War I European cinema

Prior to World War I, the American cinema had lagged behind the film industries of Europe, particularly those of France and Italy, in such matters as feature production and the establishment of permanent theatres. During the war, however, European film production virtually ceased, in part because the same chemicals used in the production of celluloid were necessary for the manufacture of gunpowder. The American cinema, meanwhile, experienced a period of unprecedented prosperity and growth. By the end of the war, it exercised nearly total control of the international market: when the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919, 90 percent of all films screened in Europe, Africa, and Asia were American, and the figure for South America was (and remained through the 1950s) close to 100 percent. The main exception was Germany, which had been cut off from American films from 1914 until the end of the war.

Germany

Before World War I, the German motion-picture audience drew broadly from different social classes, and the country was among the leaders in the construction of film theatres. But German film production lagged behind that of several other European countries, and Denmark’s film industry in particular played a more prominent role in German film exhibition than did many domestic companies. This dependence on imported films became a matter of concern among military leaders during the war, when a flood of effective anti-German propaganda films began to pour into Germany from the Allied countries. Therefore, on December 18, 1917, the German general Erich Ludendorff ordered the merger of the main German production, distribution, and exhibition companies into the government-subsidized conglomerate Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA). UFA’s mission was to upgrade the quality of German films. The organization proved to be highly effective, and, when the war ended in Germany’s defeat in November 1918, the German film industry was prepared for the first time to compete in the international marketplace. Transferred to private control, UFA became the single largest studio in Europe and produced most of the films associated with the “golden age” of German cinema during the Weimar Republic (1919–33).

UFA’s first peacetime productions were elaborate costume dramas (Kostümfilme) in the vein of the prewar Italian superspectacles, and the master of this form was Ernst Lubitsch, who directed such lavish and successful historical pageants as Madame Du Barry (released in the United States as Passion, 1919), Anna Boleyn (Deception, 1920), and Das Weib des Pharao (The Loves of Pharaoh, 1921) before immigrating to the United States in 1922. These films earned the German cinema a foothold in the world market, but it was an Expressionist work, Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919), that brought the industry its first great artistic acclaim. Based on a scenario by the Czech poet Hans Janowitz and the Austrian writer Carl Mayer, the film recounts a series of brutal murders that are committed in the north German town of Holstenwall by a somnambulist at the bidding of a demented mountebank, who believes himself to be the incarnation of a homicidal 18th-century hypnotist named Dr. Caligari. Erich Pommer, Caligari’s producer at Decla-Bioskop (an independent production company that was to merge with UFA in 1921), added a scene to the original scenario so that the story appears to be narrated by a madman confined to an asylum of which the mountebank is director and head psychiatrist. To represent the narrator’s tortured mental state, the director, Robert Wiene, hired three prominent Expressionist artists—Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig, and Walter Reimann—to design sets that depicted exaggerated dimensions and deformed spatial relationships. To heighten this architectural stylization (and also to economize on electric power, which was rationed in postwar Germany), bizarre patterns of light and shadow were painted directly onto the scenery and even onto the characters’ makeup.

In its effort to embody disturbed psychological states through decor, Caligari influenced enormously the UFA films that followed it and gave rise to the movement known as German Expressionism. The films of this movement were completely studio-made and often used distorted sets and lighting effects to create a highly subjective mood. They were primarily films of fantasy and terror that employed horrific plots to express the theme of the soul in search of itself. Most were photographed by one of the two great cinematographers of the Weimar period, Karl Freund and Fritz Arno Wagner. Representative works included F.W. Murnau’s Der Januskopf (Janus-Faced,

1920), adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s Der Golem (The Golem, 1920), adapted from a Jewish legend in which a gigantic clay statue becomes a raging monster; Arthur Robison’s Schatten (Warning Shadows, 1922); Wiene’s Raskolnikow (1923), based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924); and Henrik Galeen’s Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1926), which combines the Faust legend with a doppelgänger, or double, motif. In addition to winning international prestige for German films, Expressionism produced two directors who would become major figures in world cinema, Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau.

Lang had already directed several successful serials, including Die Spinnen (The Spiders, 1919–20), when he collaborated with his future wife, the scriptwriter Thea von Harbou, to produce Der müde Tod (Destiny, 1921) for Decla-Bioskop. This episodic Romantic allegory of doomed lovers, set in several different historical periods, earned Lang acclaim for his dynamic compositions of architectural line and space. Lang’s use of striking, stylized images is also demonstrated in the other films of his Expressionist period, notably the crime melodrama Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922), the Wagnerian diptych Siegfried (1922–24) and Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge, 1922–23), and the stunningly futuristic Metropolis (1926), perhaps the greatest science-fiction film ever made. After directing the early sound masterpiece M (1931), based on child murders in Düsseldorf, Lang became increasingly estranged from German political life. He emigrated in 1933 to escape the Nazis and began a second career in the Hollywood studios the following year.

PETER LORRIE IN M 1931
DIRECTED
FRITZ LANG

Murnau made several minor Expressionist films before directing one of the movement’s classics, an (unauthorized) adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula entitled Nosferatu—eine Symphonie des Grauens (“Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror,” 1922), but it was Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), a film in the genre of Kammerspiel (“intimate theatre”), that made him world-famous. Scripted by Carl Mayer and produced by Erich Pommer for UFA, Der letzte Mann told the story of a hotel doorman who is humiliated by the loss of his job and—more important, apparently, in postwar German society—of his splendid paramilitary uniform. Murnau and Karl Freund, his cameraman, gave this simple tale a complex

Scene-Metropolis 1927-Fritz-Lang

narrative structure through their innovative use of camera movement and subjective point-of-view shots. In one famous example, Freund strapped a lightweight camera to his chest and stumbled drunkenly around the set of a bedroom to record the inebriated porter’s point of view. In the absence of modern cranes and dollies, at various points in the filming Murnau and Freund placed the camera on moving bicycles, fire engine ladders, and overhead cables in order to achieve smooth, sustained movement. The total effect was a tapestry of subjectively involving movement and intense identification with the narrative. Even more remarkably, the film conveyed its meaning without using any printed intertitles for dialogue or explanation.

Der letzte Mann was universally hailed as a masterpiece and probably had more influence on Hollywood style than any other single foreign film in history. Its “unchained camera” technique (Mayer’s phrase) spawned many imitations in Germany and elsewhere, the most significant being E.A. Dupont’s circus-tent melodrama Variété (1925). The film also brought Murnau a long-term Hollywood contract, which he began to fulfill in 1927 after completing two last “superproductions,” Tartüff (Tartuffe, 1925) and Faust (1926), for UFA.

In 1924 the German mark was stabilized by the so-called Dawes Plan, which financed the long-term payment of Germany’s war-reparations debt and curtailed all exports. This created an artificial prosperity in the economy at large, which lasted only until the stock market crash of 1929, but it was devastating to the film industry, the bulk of whose revenues came from foreign markets. Hollywood then seized the opportunity to cripple its only serious European rival, saturating Germany with American films and buying its independent theatre chains. As a result of these forays and its own internal mismanagement, UFA stood on the brink of bankruptcy by the end of 1925. It was saved by a $4 million loan offered by two major American studios, Famous Players–Lasky (later Paramount) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in exchange for collaborative rights to UFA studios, theatres, and creative personnel. This arrangement resulted in the founding of the Parufamet (Paramount-UFA-Metro) Distribution Company in early 1926 and the almost immediate emigration of UFA film artists and technicians to Hollywood, where they worked for a variety of studios. This first Germanic migration was temporary. Many of the filmmakers went back to UFA disgusted at the assembly-line character of the American studio system, but many—such as Lubitsch, Freund, and Murnau—stayed on to launch full-fledged Hollywood careers, and many more would return during the 1930s to escape the Nazi regime.

In the meantime, the new sensibility that had entered German intellectual life turned away from the morbid psychological themes of Expressionism toward an acceptance of “life as it is lived.” Called die neue Sachlichkeit (“the new objectivity”), this spirit stemmed from the economic dislocations that beset German society in the wake of the war, particularly the impoverishment of the middle classes through raging inflation. In cinema, die neue Sachlichkeit translated into the grim social realism of the “street” films of the late 1920s, including G.W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925), Bruno Rahn’s Dirnentragödie (Tragedy of the Streets, 1927), Joe May’s Asphalt (1929), and Piel Jutzi’s Berlin-Alexanderplatz (1931). Named for their prototype, Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (The Street, 1923), these films focused on the disillusionment, cynicism, and ultimate resignation of ordinary German people whose lives were crippled during the postwar inflation.

The master of the form was G.W. Pabst, whose work established conventions of continuity editing that would become essential to the sound film. In such important realist films as Die freudlose Gasse, Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, 1927), Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929), and Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl, 1929), Pabst created complex continuity sequences, using techniques that became key features of Hollywood’s “invisible” editing style, such as cutting on action, cutting from a shot of a character’s glance to one of what the character sees (motivated point-of-view shots), and cutting to a reverse angle shot (one in which the camera angle has changed 180 degrees; e.g., in a scene in which a man and a woman face one another in conversation, the man is seen from the woman’s point of view, and then the woman is shown from the man’s point of view). Pabst later became an important figure of the early sound period, contributing two significant works in his pacifist films Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft (“Comradeship,” 1931). Emigrating from Germany after the Nazis seized power in 1933, Pabst worked in France and briefly in Hollywood. He returned to Germany in 1941 and made several films for the Nazi-controlled film industry during World War II.

By March 1927, UFA was once again facing financial collapse, and it turned this time to the Prussian financier Alfred Hugenberg, a director of the powerful Krupp industrial empire and a leader of the right-wing German National Party who was sympathetic to the Nazis. Hugenberg bought out the American interests in UFA, acquiring a majority of the company’s stock and directing the remainder into the hands of his political allies. As chairman of the UFA board, he quietly instituted a nationalistic production policy that gave increasing prominence to those allies and their cause and that enabled the Nazis to subvert the German film industry when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. German cinema then fell under the authority of Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. For the next 12 years every film made in the Third Reich had to be personally approved for release by Goebbels. Jews were officially banned from the industry, which caused a vast wave of German film artists to leave for Hollywood. Los Angeles became known as “the new Weimar,” and the German cinema was emptied of the talent and brilliance that had created its golden age.

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The Soviet Union

During the decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, the history of cinema in pre-Soviet Russia was a neglected subject, if not actively suppressed. In subsequent years, scholars have brought to light and reevaluated a small but vigorous film culture in the pre-World War I era. Some 4,000 motion-picture theatres were in operation, with the French company Pathé playing a substantial role in production and distribution. Meanwhile, Russian filmmakers such as Yevgeny Bauer had developed a sophisticated style marked by artful lighting and decor.

When Russia entered World War I in August 1914, foreign films could no longer be imported, and the tsarist government established the Skobelev Committee to stimulate domestic production and produce propaganda in support of the regime. The committee had little immediate effect, but, when the tsar fell in March 1917, the Provisional Government, headed by Aleksandr Kerensky, reorganized it to produce antitsarist propaganda. When the Bolsheviks inherited the committee eight months later, they transformed it into the Cinema Committee of the People’s Commissariat of Education.

A minority party with approximately 200,000 members, the Bolsheviks had assumed the leadership of 160 million people who were scattered across the largest continuous landmass in the world, spoke more than 100 separate languages, and were mostly illiterate. Vladimir Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders looked on the motion-picture medium as a means of unifying the huge, disparate nation. Lenin was the first political leader of the 20th century to recognize both the importance of film as propaganda and its power to communicate quickly and effectively. He understood that audiences did not require literacy to comprehend a film’s meaning and that more people could be reached through mass-distributed motion pictures than through any other medium of the time. Lenin declared: “The cinema is for us the most important of the arts,” and his government gave top priority to the rapid development of the Soviet film industry, which was nationalized in August 1919 and put under the direct authority of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

There was, however, little to build upon. Most of the prerevolutionary producers had fled to Europe, wrecking their studios as they left and taking their equipment and film stock with them. A foreign blockade prevented the importation of new equipment or stock (there were no domestic facilities for manufacturing either), and massive power shortages restricted the use of what limited resources remained. The Cinema Committee was not deterred, however; its first act was to found a professional film school in Moscow to train directors, technicians, and actors for the cinema.

The Vsesoyuznyi Gosudarstvenyi Institut Kinematografii (VGIK; “All-Union State Institute of Cinematography”) was the first such school in the world. Initially it trained people in the production of agitki, existing newsreels reedited for the purpose of agitation and propaganda (agitprop). The agitki were transported on specially equipped agit-trains and agit-steamers to the provinces, where they were exhibited to generate support for the Revolution. (The state-controlled Cuban cinema used the same tactic after the revolution of 1959.) In fact, during the abysmal years of the Russian Civil War (1918–20), nearly all Soviet films were agitki of some sort. Most of the great directors of the Soviet silent cinema were trained in that form, although, having very little technical equipment and no negative film stock, they were often required to make “films without celluloid.”

Students at the VGIK were instructed to write, direct, and act out scenarios as if they were before cameras. Then—on paper—they assembled various “shots” into completed “films.” The great teacher Lev Kuleshov obtained a print of Griffith’s Intolerance and screened it for students in his “Kuleshov workshop” until they had memorized its shot structures and could rearrange its multilayered editing sequences on paper in hundreds of different combinations.

Kuleshov further experimented with editing by intercutting the same shot of a famous actor’s expressionless face with several different shots of highly expressive content—a steaming bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin, and a little girl playing with a teddy bear. The invariable response of film school audiences when shown these sequences was that the actor’s face assumed the emotion appropriate to the intercut object—hunger for the soup, sorrow for the dead woman, paternal affection for the little girl. Kuleshov reasoned from this phenomenon, known today as the “Kuleshov effect,” that the shot in film always has two values: the one it carries in itself as a photographic image of reality and the one it acquires when placed into juxtaposition with another shot. He reasoned further that the second value is more important to cinematic signification than the first and that time and space in the cinema must therefore be subordinate to the process of editing, or “montage” (coined by the Soviets from the French verb monter, “to assemble”). Kuleshov ultimately conceived of montage as an expressive process whereby dissimilar images could be linked together to create nonliteral or symbolic meaning.

Although Kuleshov made several important films, including Po zakonu (By the Law, 1926), it was as a teacher and theorist that he most deeply influenced an entire generation of Soviet directors. Two of his most brilliant students were Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.

Eisenstein was, with Griffith, one of the great pioneering geniuses of the modern cinema, and like his predecessor he produced a handful of enduring masterworks. Griffith, however, had elaborated the structure of narrative editing intuitively, whereas Eisenstein was an intellectual who formulated a modernist theory of editing based on the psychology of perception and Marxist dialectic. He was trained as a civil engineer, but in 1920 he joined the Moscow Proletkult Theatre, where he fell under the influence of the stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold and directed a number of plays in the revolutionary style of Futurism. In the winter of 1922–23 Eisenstein studied under Kuleshov and was inspired to write his first theoretical manifesto, “The Montage of Attractions.” Published in the radical journal Lef, the article advocated assaulting an audience with calculated emotional shocks for the purpose of agitation.

Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Eisenstein was invited to direct the Proletkult-sponsored film Stachka (Strike) in 1924, but, like Griffith, he knew little of the practical aspects of production. He therefore enlisted the aid of Eduard Tisse, a brilliant cinematographer at the state-owned Goskino studios, beginning a lifelong artistic collaboration. Strike is a semidocumentary representation of the brutal suppression of a strike by tsarist factory owners and police. In addition to being Eisenstein’s first film, it was also the first revolutionary mass-film of the new Soviet state. Conceived as an extended montage of shock stimuli, the film concludes with the now famous sequence in which the massacre of the strikers and their families is intercut with shots of cattle being slaughtered in an abattoir.

scene from Strike

Scene from the ending montage of Strike (1925), directed by Sergei Eisenstein.

Photographs from David Cook and the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

Strike was an immediate success, and Eisenstein was next commissioned to direct a film celebrating the 20th anniversary of the failed 1905 Revolution against tsarism. Originally intended to provide a panorama of the entire event, the project eventually came to focus on a single representative episode—the mutiny of the battleship Potemkin and the massacre of the citizens of the port of Odessa by tsarist troops. Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925) emerged as one of the most important and influential films ever made, especially in Eisenstein’s use of montage, which had improved far beyond the formulaic, if effective, juxtapositions of Strike.

Although agitational to the core, Battleship Potemkin is a work of extraordinary pictorial beauty and great elegance of form. It is symmetrically broken into five movements or acts, according to the structure of Greek tragedy. In the first of these, “Men and Maggots,” the flagrant mistreatment of the sailors at the hands of their officers is demonstrated, while the second, “Drama on the Quarterdeck,” presents the actual mutiny and the ship’s arrival in Odessa. “Appeal from the Dead” establishes the solidarity of the citizens of Odessa with the mutineers, but it is the fourth sequence, “The Odessa Steps,” which depicts the massacre of the citizens, that thrust Eisenstein and his film into the historical eminence that both occupy today. Its power is such that the film’s conclusion, “Meeting the Squadron,” in which the Battleship Potemkin in a show of brotherhood is allowed to pass through the squadron unharmed, is anticlimactic.

Battleship Potemkin

The descent of the baby carriage during “The Odessa Steps” sequence from Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein (1925).

Courtesy of the Rosa Madell Film Library; photograph from the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

Unquestionably the most famous sequence of its kind in film history, “The Odessa Steps” incarnates the theory of dialectical montage that Eisenstein later expounded in his collected writings, The Film Sense (1942) and Film Form (1949). Eisenstein believed that meaning in motion pictures is generated by the collision of opposing shots. Building on Kuleshov’s ideas, Eisenstein reasoned that montage operates according to the Marxist view of history as a perpetual conflict in which a force (thesis) and a counterforce (antithesis) collide to produce a totally new and greater phenomenon (synthesis). He compared this dialectical process in film editing to “the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving forward its automobile or tractor.” The force of “The Odessa Steps” arises when the viewer’s mind combines individual, independent shots and forms a new, distinct conceptual impression that far outweighs the shots’ narrative significance. Through Eisenstein’s accelerated manipulations of filmic time and space, the slaughter on the stone steps—where hundreds of citizens find themselves trapped between descending tsarist militia above and Cossacks below—acquires a powerful symbolic meaning. With the addition of a stirring revolutionary score by the German Marxist composer Edmund Meisel, the agitational appeal of Battleship Potemkin became nearly irresistible, and, when exported in early 1926, it made Eisenstein world-famous.

scene from Battleship Potemkin

Scene from “The Odessa Steps” sequence in the film Battleship Potemkin (1925), directed by Sergei Eisenstein.

Goskino/photograph, the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

Eisenstein’s next project, Oktyabr (October, 1928), was commissioned by the Central Committee to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Accordingly, vast resources, including the Soviet army and navy, were placed at the director’s disposal. Eisenstein based the shooting script on voluminous documentary material from the era and on John Reed’s book Ten Days That Shook the World. When the film was completed in November 1927, it was just under four hours long. While Eisenstein was making October, however, Joseph Stalin had taken control of the Politburo from Leon Trotsky, and the director was forced to cut the print by one-third to eliminate references to the exiled Trotsky.

Eisenstein had consciously used October as a laboratory for experimenting with “intellectual” or “ideological” montage, an abstract type of editing in which the relationships established between shots are conceptual rather than visual or emotional. When the film was finally released, however, Stalinist critics attacked this alleged “formalist excess” (aestheticism or elitism). The same charge was leveled even more bitterly against Eisenstein’s next film, Staroe i novoe (Old and New 1929), which Stalinist bureaucrats completely disavowed. Stalin hated Eisenstein because he was an intellectual and a Jew, but the director’s international stature was such that he could not be publicly purged. Instead, Stalin used the Soviet state-subsidy apparatus to foil Eisenstein’s projects and attack his principles at every turn, a situation that resulted in the director’s failure to complete another film until Alexander Nevsky was commissioned in 1938.

Eisenstein’s nearest rival in the Soviet silent cinema was his fellow student Vsevolod Pudovkin. Like Eisenstein, Pudovkin developed a new theory of montage, but one based on cognitive linkage rather than dialectical collision. He maintained that “the film is not shot, but built, built up from the separate strips of celluloid that are its raw material.” Pudovkin, like Griffith, most often used montage for narrative rather than symbolic purpose. His films are more personal than Eisenstein’s; the epic drama that is the focus of Eisenstein’s films exists in Pudovkin’s films merely to provide a backdrop for the interplay of human emotions.

Pudovkin’s major work is Mat (Mother, 1926), a tale of strikebreaking and terrorism in which a woman loses first her husband and then her son to the opposing sides of the 1905 Revolution. The film was internationally acclaimed for the innovative intensity of its montage, as well as for its emotion and lyricism. Pudovkin’s later films include Konets Sankt-Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg, 1927), which, like Eisenstein’s October, was commissioned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Potomok Chingis-Khana (The Heir to Genghis Khan, or Storm over Asia, 1928), which is set in Central Asia during the Russian Civil War. Both mingle human drama with the epic and the symbolic as they tell a story of a politically naive person who is galvanized into action by tsarist tyranny. Although Pudovkin was never persecuted as severely by the Stalinists as Eisenstein, he too was publicly charged with formalism for his experimental sound film Prostoi sluchai (A Simple Case, 1932), which he was forced to release without its sound track. Pudovkin made several more sound films but remains best known for his silent work.

Two other seminal figures of the Soviet silent era were Aleksandr Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov (original name Denis Kaufman). Dovzhenko, the son of Ukrainian peasants, had been a political cartoonist and painter before becoming a director at the state-controlled Odessa studios in 1926. After several minor works, he made Zvenigora (1928), a collection of boldly stylized tales about a hunt for an ancient Scythian treasure set during four different stages of Ukrainian history; Arsenal (1929), an epic film poem about the effects of revolution and civil war upon the Ukraine; and Zemlya (Earth, 1930), which is considered to be his masterpiece. Earth tells the story of the conflict between a family of wealthy landowning peasants (kulaks) and the young peasants of a collective farm in a small Ukrainian village, but the film is less a narrative than a lyric hymn to the cyclic recurrence of birth, life, love, and death in nature and in humankind. Although the film is acclaimed today, when it was released, Stalinist critics denounced it as counterrevolutionary. Soon after, Dovzhenko entered a period of political eclipse, during which, however, he continued to make films.

Aleksandr Dovzhenko

Aleksandr Dovzhenko.

Tass/Sovfoto

Dziga Vertov (a pseudonym meaning “spinning top”) was an artist of quite different talents. He began his career as an agitki photographer and newsreel editor and is now acknowledged as the father of cinema verité (a self-consciously realistic documentary movement of the 1960s and ’70s) for his development and practice of the theory of the kino-glaz (“cinema-eye”). Vertov articulated this doctrine in the early 1920s in a number of radical manifestos in which he denounced conventional narrative cinema as impotent and demanded that it be replaced with a cinema of actuality based on the “organization of camera-recorded documentary material.” Between 1922 and 1925, he put his idea into practice in a series of 23 carefully crafted newsreel-documentaries entitled Kino-pravda (“film truth”) and Goskinokalender. Vertov’s most famous film is Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), a feature-length portrait of Moscow from dawn to dusk. The film plays upon the “city symphony” genre inaugurated by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, the Symphony of a Great City (1927), but Vertov repeatedly draws attention to the filmmaking process to create an autocritique of cinema itself.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Vertov welcomed the coming of sound, envisioning it as a “radio-ear” to accompany the “cinema-eye.” His first sound film, Entuziazm—simfoniya Donbassa (Symphony of the Donbas, 1931), was an extraordinary contribution to the new medium, as was Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs About Lenin, 1934), yet Vertov could not escape the charge of formalist error any more than his peers. Although he did make the feature film Kolybelnaya (Lullaby) in 1937, for the most part the Stalinist establishment reduced him to the status of a newsreel photographer after 1934.

Many other Soviet filmmakers played important roles in the great decade of experiment that followed the Revolution, among them Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, Boris Barnet, Yakov Protazanov, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Abram Room, and the documentarian Esther Shub. The period came to an abrupt end in 1929, when Stalin removed the state film trust (then called Sovkino) from the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Education and placed it under the direct authority of the Supreme Council of the National Economy. Reorganized as Soyuzkino, the trust was turned over to the reactionary bureaucrat Boris Shumyatsky, a proponent of the narrowly ideological doctrine known as Socialist Realism. This policy, which came to dominate the Soviet arts, dictated that individual creativity be subordinated to the political aims of the party and the state. In practice, it militated against the symbolic, the experimental, and the avant-garde in favour of a literal-minded “people’s art” that glorified representative Soviet heroes and idealized Soviet experience. The restraints imposed made it impossible for the great filmmakers of the postrevolutionary era to produce creative or innovative work, and the Soviet cinema went into decline.

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The Pre-World War II Sound Era

Introduction of sound

The idea of combining film and sound had been around since the invention of the cinema itself: Thomas Edison had commissioned the Kinetograph to provide visual images for his phonograph, and William Dickson had actually synchronized the two machines in a device briefly marketed in the 1890s as the Kinetophone. Léon Gaumont’s Chronophone in France and Cecil Hepworth’s Vivaphone system in England employed a similar technology, and each was used to produce hundreds of synchronized shorts between 1902 and 1912. In Germany producer-director Oskar Messter began to release all of his films with recorded musical scores as early as 1908. By the time the feature had become the dominant film form in the West, producers regularly commissioned orchestral scores to accompany prestigious productions, and virtually all films were accompanied by cue sheets suggesting appropriate musical selections for performance during exhibition.

Actual recorded sound required amplification for sustained periods of use, however, which became possible only after Lee De Forest’s perfection in 1907 of the Audion tube, a three-element, or triode, vacuum tube that magnified sound and drove it through speakers so that it could be heard by a large audience. In 1919 De Forest developed an optical sound-on-film process patented as Phonofilm, and between 1923 and 1927 he made more than 1,000 synchronized sound shorts for release to specially wired theatres. The public was widely interested in these films, but the major Hollywood producers, to whom De Forest vainly tried to sell his system, were not: they viewed “talking pictures” as an expensive novelty with little potential return.

The Pre-World War II Sound Era

Introduction of sound

The Pre-World War II Sound Era

Introduction of sound

By that time, Western Electric, the manufacturing subsidiary of American Telephone & Telegraph Company, had perfected a sophisticated sound-on-disc system called Vitaphone, which their representatives attempted to market to Hollywood in 1925. Like De Forest, they were rebuffed by the major studios, but Warner Brothers, then a minor studio in the midst of aggressive expansion, bought both the system and the right to sublease it to other producers. Warner Brothers had no more faith in talking pictures than did the major studios but thought that the novelty could be exploited for short-term profits. The studio planned to use Vitaphone to provide synchronized orchestral accompaniment for all Warner Brothers films, thereby enhancing their marketability to second- and third-run exhibitors whwho could not afford to hire live orchestral accompaniment. After mounting a $3 million promotion, Warner Brothers debuted the system on August 6, 1926, with Don Juan, a lavish costume drama starring John Barrymore, directed by Alan Crosland, and featuring a score performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The response was enthusiastic; Warner Brothers announced that all of its films for 1927 would be released with synchronized musical accompaniment and then turned immediately to the production of its second Vitaphone feature. The Jazz Singer (1927), also directed by Crosland,included popular songs and incidental dialogue in addition to the orchestral score; its phenomenal success virtually ensured the industry’s conversion to sound.

Billboard-Vitaphone-film-Don-Juan-1926

Sensing that Warner Brothers’ gamble on sound might pay off, MGM, First National, Paramount, and others had asked the MPPDA to investigate competing sound systems in early 1927. There were several sound-on-film systems that were technologically superior to Vitaphone, but the rights to most of them were owned by William Fox, president of Fox Film Corporation. Fox, like the Warners, had seen sound as a way of cornering the market among smaller exhibitors. Therefore, in the summer of 1926, he acquired the rights to the Case-Sponable sound-on-film system (whose similarity to De Forest’s Phonofilm was the subject of subsequent patent litigation) and formed the Fox-Case Corporation to make shorts under the trade name Fox Movietone. Six months later he secretly bought the American rights to the German Tri-Ergon process, whose flywheel mechanism was essential to the continuous

Al-Jolson-Eugenie-Besserer-
The-Jazz-Singer (1)

reproduction of optical sound. To cover himself completely Fox negotiated a reciprocal pact between Fox-Case and Vitaphone under which each licensed the other to use its sound systems, equipment, and personnel. The sound-on-film system eventually prevailed over sound-on-disc because it enabled image and sound to be recorded simultaneously in the same (photographic) medium, ensuring their precise and automatic synchronization.

Despite Warner Brothers’ obvious success with sound films, film industry leaders were not eager to lease sound equipment from a direct competitor. They banded together, and Warner Brothers was forced to give up its rights to the Vitaphone system in exchange for a share in any new royalties earned. The major film companies then wasted no time. By May 1928 virtually every studio in Hollywood, major and minor, was licensed by Western Electric’s newly created marketing subsidiary, Electrical Research Products, Incorporated (ERPI), to use Western Electric equipment with the Movietone sound-on-film recording system. ERPI’s monopoly did not please the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which had tried to market a sound-on-film system that had been developed in the laboratories of its parent company, General Electric, and had been patented in 1925 as RCA Photophone. In October 1928 RCA therefore acquired the Keith-Albee-Orpheum vaudeville circuit and merged it with Joseph P. Kennedy’s Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) to form RKO Radio Pictures for the express purpose of producing sound films using the Photophone system (which ultimately became the industry standard).

Conversion to sound

The wholesale conversion to sound of all three sectors of the American film industry took place in less than 15 months between late 1927 and 1929, and the profits of the major companies increased during that period by as much as 600 percent. Although the transition was fast, orderly, and profitable, it was also enormously expensive. The industrial system as it had evolved for the previous three decades needed to be completely overhauled; studios and theatres had to be totally reequipped and creative personnel retrained or fired. In order to fund the conversion, the film companies were forced to borrow in excess of $350 million, which placed them under the indirect control of the two major New York-based financial groups, the Morgan group and the Rockefeller group.

Furthermore, although cooperation between the film companies through such agencies as the MPPDA, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Society of Motion Picture Engineers ensured a smooth transition in corporate terms, inside the newly wired theatres and studio soundstages there was confusion and disruption. The three competing systems—Vitaphone, Movietone, and Photophone—were all initially incompatible, and their technologies were under such constant modification that equipment was sometimes obsolete before it was uncrated. Whatever system producers chose, exhibitors during the early transitional period were forced to maintain both sound-on-disc and sound-on-film reproduction equipment. Even as late as 1931, studios were still releasing films in both formats to accommodate theatres owned by sound-on-disc interests.

It was in the area of production, however, that the greatest problems arose. The statement that “the movies ceased to move when they began to talk” accurately described the films made during the earliest years of the transition, largely because of technical limitations. Early microphones, for example, had a very limited range. In addition, they were large, clumsy, and difficult to move, so they were usually concealed in a single, stationary location on the set. The actors, who had to speak directly into the microphones to register on the sound track, were therefore forced to remain practically motionless while delivering dialogue. The microphones caused further problems because they were omnidirectional within their range and picked up every sound made near them on the set, especially the noisy whir of running cameras (which were motorized in 1929 to run at an even speed of 24 frames per second to ensure undistorted sound synchronization; silent cameras had been mainly hand-cranked at rates averaging 16 to 18 frames per second). To prevent the recording of camera noise, cameras and their operators were initially enclosed in soundproof glass-paneled booths that were only 6 feet (2 metres) long per side. The booths, which were facetiously called “iceboxes” because they were uncomfortably hot and stuffy, literally imprisoned the camera. The filmmakers’ inability to tilt or dolly the camera (although they could pan it by as much as 30 degrees on its tripod), combined with the actors’ immobility, helps to account for the static nature of so many early sound films.

The impact of sound recording on editing was even more regressive, because sound and image had to be recorded simultaneously to be synchronous. In sound-on-disc films, scenes were initially made to play for 10 minutes at a time in order to record dialogue continuously on 16-inch (41-cm) discs; such scenes were impossible to edit until the technology of rerecording was perfected in the early 1930s. Sound-on-film systems also militated against editing at first; optical sound tracks run approximately 20 frames in advance of their corresponding image tracks, making it extremely difficult to cut a composite print without eliminating portions of the relevant sound. As a result, no matter which system of sound recording was used, most of the editing in early sound films was purely functional. In general, cuts could be made—and the camera moved—only when no sound was being recorded on the set.

Most of these technical problems were resolved by 1933, although equilibrium was not fully restored to the production process until after the mid-1930s. Sound-on-disc filming, for example, was abandoned in 1930, and by 1931 all the studios had removed their cameras from the iceboxes and converted to the use of lightweight soundproof camera housings known as “blimps.” Within several years, smaller, quieter, self-insulating cameras were produced, eliminating the need for external soundproofing altogether. It even became possible again to move the camera by using a wide range of boom cranes, camera supports, and steerable dollies. Microphones too became increasingly mobile as a variety of booms were developed for them from 1930 onward. These long radial arms suspended the microphone above the set, allowing it to follow the movements of actors and rendering the stationary microphones of the early years obsolete. Microphones also became more directional throughout the decade, and track noise-suppression techniques came into use as early as 1931.

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Postsynchronization

The technological development that most liberated the sound film, however, was the practice known variously as postsynchronization, rerecording, or dubbing, in which image and sound are printed on separate pieces of film so that they can be manipulated independently. Postsynchronization enabled filmmakers to edit images freely again. Because the overwhelming emphasis of the period from 1928 to 1931 had been on obtaining high-quality sound in production, however, the idea that the sound track could be modified after it was recorded took a while to catch on. Many motion-picture artists and technicians felt that sound should be reproduced in films exactly as it had originally been produced on the set; they believed that anything less than an absolute pairing of sound and image would confuse audiences.

For several years, both practice and ideology dictated that sound and image be recorded simultaneously, so that everything heard on the sound track would be seen on the screen and vice versa. A vocal minority of film artists nevertheless viewed this practice of synchronous, “naturalistic” sound recording as a threat to the cinema. In their 1928 manifesto “Sound and Image,” the Soviet directors Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigory Aleksandrov denounced synchronous sound in favour of asynchronous, contrapuntal sound—sound that would counterpoint the images it accompanied to become another dynamic element in the montage process. Like the practical editing problem, the theoretical debate over the appropriate use of sound was eventually resolved by the practice of postsynchronization.

Postsynchronization seems to have first been used by the American director King Vidor for a sequence in which the hero is chased through Arkansas swamplands in the all-Black musical Hallelujah (1929). Vidor shot the action on location without sound, using a freely moving camera. Later, in the studio, he added to the film a separately recorded sound track containing both naturalistic and impressionistic effects. In the following year Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front and G.W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 both used postsynchronization for their battle scenes. Ernst Lubitsch used dubbing in his first American sound films, the dynamic musicals The Love Parade (1929) and Monte Carlo (1930), as did the French director René Clair in Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930). In all these early instances, sound was recorded and rerecorded on a single track, although some American directors, including Milestone and the Russian-born Armenian Rouben Mamoulian (Applause, 1929; City Streets, 1931), had experimented with multiple microphone setups and overlapping dialogue as early as 1929. Generally, through 1932, either dialogue or music dominated the sound track unless they had been simultaneously recorded on the set. In 1933, however, technology was introduced that allowed filmmakers to mix separately recorded tracks for background music, sound effects, and synchronized dialogue at the dubbing stage. By the late 1930s, postsynchronization and multiple-channel mixing had become standard industry procedure.

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All-Quiet-on (1)

All Quiet on the Western Front

Lew Ayres (left) and Raymond Griffith in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), directed by Lewis Milestone.

Nontechnical effects of sound

Other changes wrought by sound were more purely human. Directors, for example, could no longer literally direct their performers while the cameras were rolling and sound was being recorded. Actors and actresses were suddenly required to have pleasant voices and to act without the assistance of mood music or the director’s shouted instructions through long dialogue takes. Many found that they could not learn lines; others tried and were defeated by heavy foreign accents (e.g., Emil Jannings, Pola Negri, Vilma Banky, and Lya de Putti) or voices that did not match their screen image (e.g., Colleen Moore, Corinne Griffith, Norma Talmadge, and John Gilbert). Numerous silent stars were supplanted during the transitional period by stage actors or film actors with stage experience. “Canned theatre,” or literal transcriptions of stage hits, became a dominant Hollywood form between 1929 and 1931, which brought many Broadway players and directors into the film industry on a more or less permanent basis. In addition, to fulfill the unprecedented need for dialogue scripts, the studios imported hundreds of editors, critics, playwrights, and novelists, many of whom would make lasting contributions to the verbal sophistication of the American sound film.

As sound demanded new filmmaking techniques and talents, it also created new genres and renovated old ones. The realism it permitted inspired the emergence of tough, socially pertinent films with urban settings. Crime epics, or gangster films, such as Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931), William Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931), and Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932), used sound to exploit urban slang and the audible pyrotechnics of the recently invented Thompson submachine gun. Subgenres of the gangster film were the prison film (e.g., The Big House, 1930; Hawks’s The Criminal Code, 1931; LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 1932) and the newspaper picture (e.g., Milestone’s The Front Page, 1931; LeRoy’s Five Star Final, 1931; John Cromwell’s Scandal Sheet, 1931; Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde, 1931), both of which relied on authentic-sounding vernacular speech.

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The public’s fascination with speech also accounted for the new popularity of historical biographies, or “biopics.” These films were modeled on the Universum Film AG’s (UFA’s) silent Kostümfilm, but dialogue enhanced their verisimilitude. Several actors with impressive speaking voices were often associated with the genre, notably George Arliss (Disraeli, 1929; The House of Rothschild, 1934) and Paul Muni (The Life of Emile Zola, 1937; Juarez, 1939) in the United States and Charles Laughton (Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1933; Rembrandt, 1936) in England.

Paul-Muni-Scarface

In the realm of comedy, pure slapstick could not and did not survive, predicated as it was on purely visual humour. It was replaced by equally vital—but ultimately less surreal and abstract—sound comedies: the anarchic dialogue comedies of the Marx Brothers (The Cocoanuts, 1929; Animal Crackers, 1930; Monkey Business, 1931; Horse Feathers, 1932; Duck Soup, 1933) and W.C. Fields (The Golf Specialist, 1930; The Dentist, 1932; Million Dollar Legs, 1932) and the fast-paced wisecracking “screwball” comedies of directors such as Capra (Lady for a Day, 1933; It Happened One Night, 1934; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936), Hawks (Twentieth Century, 1934; Bringing Up Baby, 1938), Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey, 1936), Mitchell Leisen (Easy Living, 1937), and Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, 1937).

Duck Soup

(From left) Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx, and Groucho Marx featured on a lobby card for Duck Soup (1933), directed by Leo McCarey.

© Paramount Pictures Corporation

The horror-fantasy genre, traditionally rooted in German Expressionism, was greatly enhanced by sound, which not only permitted the addition of eerie sound effects but also restored the dimension of literary dialogue present in so many of the original sources. Appropriately, Universal Pictures’ three great horror classics—Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), and Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932)—were all early sound films.

Frankenstein

Colin Clive (left) and Dwight Frye (right) in Frankenstein (1931), directed by James Whale.

One significant genre whose emergence was obviously contingent upon sound was the musical. Versions of Broadway musicals were among the first sound films made (including, of course, the catalyst for the conversion, Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer), and by the early 1930s the movie musical had developed in formal sophistication to become perhaps the major American genre of the decade. Among the formidable artists who helped to achieve this sophistication were director Ernst Lubitsch at Paramount (The Love Parade, 1929; Monte Carlo, 1930; The Smiling Lieutenant, 1931), dance director Busby Berkeley at Warner Brothers (42nd Street, 1933; Gold Diggers of 1933, 1933; Footlight Parade, 1933; Dames, 1934), and dancer-star Fred Astaire, who choreographed and directed his own integrated dance sequences at RKO (The Gay Divorcee, 1934; Roberta, 1935; Top Hat, 1935; Swing Time, 1936). Ginger Rogers was Astaire’s dancing partner in these and six other films during the 1930s.

Top Hat

Fred Astaire in Top Hat, 1935.

The Bettmann Archive

Walt Disney pioneered a genre that might be called the animated musical with The Skeleton Dance (1929), the first entry in his “Silly Symphony” series. Unburdened by the awkward logistics of live-action shooting, Disney was free to combine sound and image asynchronously or with perfect frame-by-frame synchronization in such classic cartoons as Steamboat Willie (1928—Mickey Mouse’s debut) and The Three Little Pigs (1933). To enhance their fantasy-like appeal, both the musical and the animated film made early use of the two-colour imbibition process introduced by the Technicolor Corporation in 1928, during the conversion to sound. Animated films also pioneered the use of Technicolor’s three-colour, three-strip imbibition process, introduced in 1932.

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Introduction of colour

Photographic colour entered the cinema at approximately the same time as sound, although, as with sound, various colour effects had been used in films since the invention of the medium. Georges Méliès, for example, employed 21 women at his Montreuil studio to hand-colour his films frame by frame, but hand-colouring was not cost-effective unless films were very short. In the mid-1900s, as films began to approach one reel in length and more prints of each film were sold, mechanized stenciling processes were introduced. In Pathé’s Pathécolor system, for example, a stencil was cut for each colour desired (up to six) and aligned with the print; colour was then applied through the stencil frame by frame at high speeds. With the advent of the feature and the conversion of the industry to mass production during the 1910s, frame-by-frame stenciling was replaced by mechanized tinting and toning. Tinting coloured all the light areas of a picture and was achieved by immersing a black-and-white print in dye or by using coloured film base for printing. The toning process involved chemically treating film emulsion to colour the dark areas of the print. Each process produced monochrome images, the colour of which was usually chosen to correspond to the mood or setting of the scene. Occasionally, the two processes were combined to produce elaborate two-colour effects. By the early 1920s, nearly all American features included at least one coloured sequence; but after 1927, when it was discovered that tinting or toning film stock interfered with the transmission of optical sound, both practices were temporarily abandoned, leaving the market open to new systems of colour photography.

Photographic colour can be produced in films by using either an additive process or a subtractive one. The first systems to be developed and used were all additive ones, such as Charles Urban’s Kinemacolor (c. 1906) and Gaumont’s Chronochrome (c. 1912). They achieved varying degrees of popularity, but none was entirely successful, largely because all additive systems involve the use of both special cameras and projectors, which ultimately makes them too complicated and costly for widespread industrial use.

One of the first successful subtractive processes was a two-colour one introduced by Herbert Kalmus’s Technicolor Corporation in 1922. It used a special camera and a complex procedure to produce two separate positive prints that were then cemented together into a single print. The final print needed careful handling but could be projected by means of ordinary equipment. This “cemented positive” process was used successfully in such features as Toll of the Sea (1922) and Fairbanks’s The Black Pirate (1926). In 1928 Technicolor introduced an improved process in which two gelatin positives were used as relief matrices to “print” colour onto a single strip of film. This printing process, known as imbibition, or dye-transfer, made it possible to mass-produce sturdy, high-quality prints. Its introduction resulted in a significant rise in Technicolor production between 1929 and 1932. Colour reproduction in the two-colour Technicolor process was good, but, because only two of the three primary colours were used, it was still not completely lifelike. Its popularity began to decline sharply in 1932, and Technicolor replaced it with a three-colour system that employed the same basic principles but included all three primary colours.

For the next 25 years almost every colour film made was produced by using Technicolor’s three-colour system. Although the quality of the system was excellent, there were drawbacks. The bulk of the camera made location shooting difficult. Furthermore, Technicolor’s virtual monopoly gave it indirect control of the production companies, which were required to rent—at high rates—equipment, crew, consultants, and laboratory services from Technicolor every time they used the system. In the midst of the Depression, therefore, conversion to colour was slow and never really complete. After three-colour Technicolor was used successfully in Disney’s cartoon short The Three Little Pigs (1933), the live-action short La Cucaracha (1934), and Rouben Mamoulian’s live-action feature Becky Sharp (1935), it gradually worked its way into mainstream feature production (The Garden of Allah, 1936; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937; The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938; The Wizard of Oz, 1939; Gone with the Wind, 1939), although it remained strongly associated with fantasy and spectacle.

scene from The Wizard of Oz

(From left) The Tin Man (Jack Haley), the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr), Dorothy (Judy Garland), the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), and (top) the Wizard of Oz (Frank Morgan) in The Wizard of Oz (1939), directed by Victor Fleming.

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The Hollywood studio system

If the coming of sound changed the aesthetic dynamics of the filmmaking process, it altered the economic structure of the industry even more, precipitating some of the largest mergers in motion-picture history. Throughout the 1920s, Paramount, MGM, First National, and other studios had conducted ambitious campaigns of vertical integration by ruthlessly acquiring first-run theatre chains. It was primarily in response to those aggressive maneuvers that Warner Brothers and Fox sought to dominate smaller exhibitors by providing prerecorded musical accompaniment to their films. The unexpected success of their strategy forced the industrywide conversion to sound and transformed Warner Brothers and Fox into major corporations. By 1929, Warner Brothers had acquired the Stanley theatre circuit, which controlled nearly all the first-run houses in the mid-Atlantic states, and the production and distribution facilities of its former rival First National to become one of the largest studios in Hollywood. Fox went even farther, building the multimillion-dollar Movietone City in Westwood, California, in 1928 and acquiring controlling shares of both Loew’s, Inc., the parent corporation of MGM, and Gaumont British, England’s largest producer-distributor-exhibitor. Its holdings were surpassed only by those of Paramount, which controlled an international distribution network and the vast Publix theatre chain. In an effort to become even more powerful, Paramount in 1929 acquired one-half of the newly formed Columbia Broadcasting System and proposed a merger with Warner Brothers. It was then that the U.S. Department of Justice intervened, forbidding Paramount’s merger with Warner Brothers and divorcing Fox from Loew’s.

Without government interference, “Paramount-Vitaphone” and “Fox-Loew’s” might have divided the entertainment industries of the entire English-speaking world between them. As it was, by 1930, 95 percent of all American production was concentrated in the hands of only eight studios—five vertically integrated major companies, which controlled production, distribution, and exhibition, and three horizontally integrated minor ones that controlled production and distribution. Distribution was conducted at both a national and an international level: since about 1925, foreign rentals had accounted for half of all American feature revenues, and they would continue to do so for the next two decades. Exhibition was controlled through the major studios’ ownership of 2,600 first-run theatres, which represented 16 percent of the national total but generated three-fourths of the revenue. Film production throughout the 1930s and ’40s consumed only 5 percent of total corporate assets, while distribution accounted for another 1 percent. The remaining 94 percent of the studios’ investment went to the exhibition sector. In short, as film historian Douglas Gomery pointed out, the five major studios of the time can best be characterized as “diversified theater chains, producing features, shorts, cartoons, and newsreels to fill their houses.”

Each studio produced a distinctive style of entertainment, depending on its corporate economy and the personnel it had under contract. MGM, the largest and most powerful of the major studios, was also the most “American” and was given to the celebration of middle-class values in a visual style characterized by bright, even, high-key lighting and opulent production design. Paramount, with its legions of UFA-trained directors, art directors, and cameramen, was thought to be the most “European” of the studios. It produced the most sophisticated and visually baroque films of the era. Conditioned by its recent experience as a struggling minor studio, Warner Brothers was the most cost-conscious of the major companies. Its directors worked on a quota system, and a flat, low-key lighting style was decreed by the studio to conceal the cheapness of its sets. Warner Brothers’ films were often targeted for working-class audiences. Twentieth Century–Fox was formed in 1935 by the merger of Fox Film Corporation and Joseph M. Schenck’s Twentieth Century Pictures after William Fox was bankrupted through his financial manipulations. The studio acquired a reputation for its tight budget and production control, but its films were noted for their glossy attractiveness and state-of-the-art special effects. RKO Radio was the smallest of the major companies and never achieved complete financial stability during the studio era; it became prominent, however, as the producer of King Kong (1933), the Astaire-Rogers dance cycle, and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and also as the distributor of Disney’s features.

The minor studios were Carl Laemmle’s Universal Pictures, which became justly famous for its horror films; Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures, whose main assets were director Frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin; and United Artists, which functioned as a distributor for independent American features and for Alexander Korda’s London Film Productions. In terms of total assets, the five major studios were about four times as big as the three minor ones, with MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, and Twentieth Century–Fox all about the same size and RKO approximately 25 percent smaller than its peers. At the very bottom of the film industry hierarchy were a score of poorly capitalized studios, such as Republic, Monogram, and Grand National, that produced cheap formulaic hour-long “B movies” for the second half of double bills. The double feature, an attraction introduced in the early 1930s to counter the Depression-era box-office slump, was the standard form of exhibition for about 15 years. The larger studios were, for the most part, not interested in producing B movies for double bills, because, unlike the main feature, whose earnings were based on box-office receipts, the second feature rented at a flat rate, which meant that the profit it returned, though guaranteed, was fixed at a small amount. At their peak, the B-film studios produced 40–50 movies per year and provided a training ground for such stars as John Wayne. The films were made as quickly as possible, and directors functioned as their own producers, with complete authority over their projects’ minuscule budgets.

An important aspect of the studio system was the Production Code, which was implemented in 1934 in response to pressure from the Legion of Decency and public protest against the graphic violence and sexual suggestiveness of some sound films (the urban gangster films, for example, and the films of Mae West). The Legion had been established in 1933 by the American bishops of the Roman Catholic church (armed with a mandate from the Vatican) to fight for better and more “moral” motion pictures. In April 1934, with the support of both Protestant and Jewish organizations, the Legion called for a nationwide boycott of movies it considered indecent. The studios, having lost millions of dollars in 1933 as the delayed effects of the Depression caught up with the box office, rushed to appease the protesters by authorizing the MPPDA to create the Production Code Administration. A prominent Catholic layman, Joseph I. Breen, was appointed to head the administration, and under Breen’s auspices Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest, and Martin Quigley, a Catholic publisher, coauthored the code whose provisions would dictate the content of American movies, without exception, for the next 20 years.

In a swing away from the excesses of the “new morality” of the Jazz Age, the Production Code was monumentally repressive, forbidding the depiction on-screen of almost everything germane to the experience of normal human adults. It prohibited showing “scenes of passion,” and adultery, illicit sex, seduction, and rape could not even be alluded to unless they were absolutely essential to the plot and severely punished by the film’s end. The code demanded that the sanctity of marriage be upheld at all times, although sexual relations were not to be suggested between spouses. It forbade the use of profanity, vulgarity, and racial epithets; prostitution, miscegenation, sexual deviance, or drug addiction; nudity, sexually suggestive dancing or costumes, and “lustful kissing”; and excessive drinking, cruelty to animals or children, and the representation of surgical operations, especially childbirth, “in fact or silhouette.” In the realm of violence, it was forbidden to display or to discuss contemporary weapons, to show the details of a crime, to show law-enforcement officers dying at the hands of criminals, to suggest excessive brutality or slaughter, or to use murder or suicide except when crucial to the plot. Finally, the code required that all criminal activity be shown to be punished; under no circumstances could any crime be represented as justified. Studios were required to submit their scripts to Breen’s office for approval before beginning filming, and completed films had to be screened for the office, and altered if necessary, in order to receive a Production Code Seal, without which no film could be distributed in the United States. Noncompliance with the code’s restrictions brought a fine of $25,000, but the studios were so eager to please that the fine was never levied in the 22-year lifetime of the code.

The studio heads were willing not merely to accept but also to institutionalize this system of de facto censorship and prior restraint because they believed it was necessary for the continued success of their business. The economic threat of a national boycott during the worst years of the Depression was real, and the film industry, which depends on pleasing a mass audience, could not afford to ignore public opinion. Producers found, moreover, that they could use the code to increase the efficiency of production. By rigidly prescribing and proscribing the kinds of behaviour that could be shown or described on the screen, the code could be used as a scriptwriter’s blueprint. A love story, for example, could move in only one direction (toward marriage); adultery and crime could have only one conclusion (disease or horrible death); dialogue in all situations had well-defined parameters; and so forth. The code, in other words, provided a framework for the construction of screenplays and enabled studios to streamline what had always been (and still is) one of the most difficult and yet most essential tasks in the production process—the creation of filmable continuity scripts. Furthermore, the Depression was a time of open political anti-Semitism in the United States, and the men who controlled the American motion-picture industry were mainly Jewish; it was not a propitious moment for them to antagonize their predominantly non-Jewish audience.

Between 1930 and 1945, the studio system produced more than 7,500 features, every stage of which, from conception through exhibition, was carefully controlled. Among these assembly-line productions are some of the most important American films ever made, the work of gifted directors who managed to transcend the mechanistic nature of the system to produce work of unique personal vision. These directors include Josef von Sternberg, whose exotically stylized films starring Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express, 1932; The Scarlet Empress, 1934) constitute a kind of painting with light; John Ford, whose vision of history as moral truth produced such mythic works as Stagecoach (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), My Darling Clementine (1946), and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); Howard Hawks, a master of genres and the architect of a tough, functional “American” style of narrative exemplified in his films Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and The Big Sleep (1946); British émigré Alfred Hitchcock, whose films appealed to the popular audience as suspense melodramas but were in fact abstract visual psychodramas of guilt and spiritual terror (Rebecca, 1940; Suspicion, 1941; Shadow of a Doubt, 1943; Notorious, 1946); and Frank Capra, whose cheerful screwball comedies (It Happened One Night, 1934) and populist fantasies of good will (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) sometimes gave way to darker warnings against losing faith and integrity (It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946). Other significant directors with less-consistent thematic or visual styles were William Wyler (Wuthering Heights, 1939; The Little Foxes, 1941), George Cukor (Camille, 1936; The Philadelphia Story, 1940), Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, 1937; Going My Way, 1944), Preston Sturges (Sullivan’s Travels, 1941; The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, 1944), and George Stevens (Gunga Din, 1939; Woman of the Year, 1942).

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The most extraordinary film to emerge from the studio system, however, was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), whose controversial theme and experimental technique combined to make it a classic. The first of six films Welles had contracted to produce for RKO with his Mercury Theater radio ensemble company, Citizen Kane made radically innovative use of sound and deep-focus photography as it examined the life of Charles Foster Kane, a character based on the press baron William Randolph Hearst. The film employs a complicated flashback structure in which Kane’s friends and associates give their accounts of the man after his death, paradoxically revealing not greatness or might but pathetic insecurity and emptiness. In creating this portrait of a powerful American who could bend international politics to his will but never fathom human love, Welles stretched the technology of image and sound recording beyond its contemporary limits. Using a newly available Eastman film stock with increased sensitivity to light, plastic-coated wide-angle lenses opened to smaller-than-normal apertures, and high-intensity arc lamps, cinematographer Gregg Toland achieved a photographic depth of field that approximated the perceptual range of the human eye and enabled Welles to place the film’s characters in several different planes of depth within a single scene. These deep-focus sequence shots are complemented throughout the film by the techniques of ambient and directional sound that Welles had learned from radio. Most important of all, the resonance of the film’s narrative matches the technical brilliance of its presentation, functioning on several levels at once: the historical, the psychological, and the mythic. Although recognized by many critics as a work of genius, Citizen Kane was a financial failure on its release, and Welles directed only three other films under his RKO contract. Citizen Kane remains, nevertheless, one of the most influential films ever made and is widely considered to be one of the greatest.

Orson Welles

Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941).

RKO Radio Pictures Inc.

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International cinema

Having created large new markets for their sound-recording technologies in the United States, Western Electric and RCA were eager to do the same abroad. Their objective coincided with the desire of the major American film studios to extend their control of the international motion-picture industry. Accordingly, the studios began to export sound films in late 1928, and ERPI and RCA began installing their equipment in European theatres at the same time. Exhibitors in the United Kingdom converted the most rapidly, with 22 percent wired for sound in 1929 and 63 percent by the end of 1932. Continental exhibitors converted more slowly, largely because of a bitter patents war between the German cartel Tobis-Klangfilm, which controlled the European rights to sound-on-film technology, and Western Electric. The dispute was finally resolved at the 1930 German-American Film Conference in Paris, where Tobis, ERPI, and RCA agreed to pool their patents and divide the world market among themselves. The language problem also delayed the conversion to sound on the Continent. Because dubbing was all but impossible in the earliest years of the transition, films had to be shot in several different languages (sometimes featuring a different cast for each version) at the time of production in order to receive wide international distribution. Paramount therefore built a huge studio in the Paris suburb of Joinville in 1930 to mass-produce multilingual films. The other major American studios quickly followed suit, making the region a factory for the round-the-clock production of movies in as many as 15 separate languages. By the end of 1931, however, the technique of dubbing had been sufficiently perfected to replace multilingual production, and Joinville was converted into a dubbing centre for all of Europe.

Great Britain

Because of the lack of a language barrier, the United Kingdom became Hollywood’s first major foreign market for sound films. The British motion-picture industry was protected from complete American domination, however, by the Cinematograph Films Act passed by Parliament in 1927. The act required that a certain minimum proportion of the films exhibited in British theatres be of domestic origin. Although most of the films made to fulfill this condition were low-budget, low-standard productions known as “quota quickies,” the British cinema produced many important film artists (most of whom were soon lured to Hollywood). One of the first major British talents to emerge after the introduction of sound was Alfred Hitchcock, who directed a series of stylish thrillers for British International Pictures and Gaumont British before he moved to Hollywood in 1939. His first sound film, Blackmail (1929), marked the effective beginning of sound production in England. The film was already in production as a silent when the director was ordered to make it as a “part-talkie.” It was especially noted for the expressive use of both naturalistic and nonnaturalistic sound, which became a distinguishing feature of Hitchcock’s later British triumphs (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934; The Thirty-nine Steps, 1935; Sabotage, 1936), as well as of the films of his American career. Among the significant British filmmakers who remained based in London were the Hungarian-born brothers Alexander, Zoltán, and Vincent Korda, who founded London Films in 1932 and collaborated on some of England’s most spectacular pre-World War II productions (e.g., The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1933; Rembrandt, 1936; Elephant Boy, 1937; The Four Feathers, 1939), and John Grierson, who produced such outstanding documentaries as Robert Flaherty’s Industrial Britain (1933) and Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1935) for the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit and its successor, the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Scene from the film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).

Gaumont-British Picture Corporation; photograph from a private collection

France

In France during the 1920s, as a result of the post-World War I decline of the Pathé and Gaumont film companies, a large number of small studios leased their facilities to independent companies, which were often formed to produce a single film. This method of film production lent itself readily to experimentation, encouraging the development of the avant-garde film movement known as Impressionism (led by Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, and Fernand Léger) and the innovative films of Abel Gance (La Roue, 1923; Napoléon vu par Abel Gance, 1927) and Dmitri Kirsanoff (Ménilmontant, 1926). Because the French film industry had evolved no marketable technology for sound recording, however, the coming of sound left producers and exhibitors alike vulnerable to the American production companies at Joinville and to the German Tobis-Klangfilm, which had been purchasing large studios in the Paris suburb of Epinay since 1929. In the face of this threat, the French industry attempted to regroup itself around what was left of the Pathé and Gaumont empires, forming two consortia—Pathé-Natan and Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert—for the production and distribution of sound films. Although neither group was financially successful, they seem to have created an unprecedented demand for French-language films about French subjects, reinvigorating the country’s cinema. Between 1928 and 1938, French film production doubled from 66 to 122 features, and, in terms of box-office receipts, the French audience was considered to be second only to the American one.

Abel Gance

Abel Gance, 1981.

Courtesy, Christiane Rogers

Many filmmakers contributed to the prominence of French cinema during the 1930s, but the three most important were René Clair, Jean Vigo, and Jean Renoir. Clair was a former avant-gardist whose contributions to the aesthetics of sound, although not so crucial as Hitchcock’s, were nevertheless significant. His Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930), frequently hailed as the first artistic triumph of the sound film, was a lively musical comedy that mixed asynchronous sound with a bare minimum of dialogue. Clair used the same technique in Le Million (1931), which employed a wide range of dynamic contrapuntal effects. À nous la liberté (Freedom for Us, 1931) was loosely based on the life of Charles Pathé and dealt with more serious themes of industrial alienation, although it still used the musical-comedy form. The film’s intelligence, visual stylization, and brilliant use of asynchronous sound made it a classic of the transitional period.

Jean Vigo completed only two features before his early death: Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933) and L’Atalante (1934). Both are lyrical films about individuals in revolt against social reality. Their intensely personal nature is thought to have influenced the style of poetic realism that characterized French cinema from 1934 to 1940 and that is exemplified by Jacques Feyder’s Pension mimosas (1935), Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937), and Marcel Carné’s Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) and Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939). Darkly poetic, these films were characterized by a brooding pessimism that reflected the French public’s despair over the failure of the Popular Front movement of 1935–37 and the seeming inevitability of war.

Jean Renoir, the son of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, made nine films before he directed the grimly realistic La Chienne (The Bitch, 1931) and La Nuit du carrefour (Night at the Crossroads, 1932), his first important essays in sound. Renoir subsequently demonstrated a spirit of increasing social concern in such films as Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932), a comic assault on bourgeois values; Toni (1934), a realistic story of Italian immigrant workers; Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of Monsieur Lange, 1935), a political parable about the need for collective action against capitalist corruption; and La Vie est à nous (“Life Is Ours”; English title The People of France, 1936), a propaganda film for the French Communist Party that contains both fictional and documentary footage. The strength of his commitment is most clearly expressed, however, by the eloquent appeal he makes for human understanding in his two pre-World War II masterworks. La Grande Illusion (Grand Illusion, 1937), set in a World War I prison camp, portrays a civilization on the brink of collapse because of national and class antagonisms; in its assertion of the primacy of human relationships and the utter futility of war (the “grand illusion”), the film stands as one of the greatest antiwar statements ever made. In La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), set in contemporary France, the breakdown of civilization has already occurred. European society is shown to be an elegant but brittle fabrication in which feeling and substance have been replaced by “manners,” a world in which “the terrible thing,” to quote the protagonist Octave (played by Renoir), “is that everyone has his reasons.” In both films Renoir continued his earlier experiments with directional sound and deep-focus composition. His technical mastery came to influence the American cinema when he immigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis in 1940.

Erich von Stroheim and Pierre Fresnay in La Grande Illusion

Erich von Stroheim (left) and Pierre Fresnay in La Grande Illusion (1937), directed by Jean Renoir.

© Réalisation d'art cinématographique; photograph from a private collection

Germany and Italy

Because of its ownership of the Tobis-Klangfilm patents, the German film industry found itself in a position of relative strength in the early years of sound, and it produced several important films during that period, including Josef von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), G.W. Pabst’s two antiwar films, Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft (1931), and his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1931). The most influential of the early German sound films, however, was Fritz Lang’s M (1931), which utilized a dimension of aural imagery to counterpoint its visuals in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail. M has no musical score but makes expressive use of nonnaturalistic sound, as when the child murderer (played by Peter Lorre) is heard to whistle a recurring theme from Grieg’s Peer Gynt before committing his crimes offscreen.

The Blue Angel

Marlene Dietrich in Der blaue Engel (1930; The Blue Angel), directed by Josef von Sternberg.

Universum Film A.G.; photograph from a private collection

After Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, the German film industry came under the complete control of the Nazi Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Its head, Joseph Goebbels, believed ideological indoctrination worked best when conveyed through entertainment, so Nazi cinema put forth its political propaganda in the form of genre films such as comedies, musicals, and melodramas. The most famous and controversial films produced in Nazi Germany were documentaries by Leni Riefenstahl, whom Hitler recruited to record a Nazi party rally for Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935) and the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin for Olympia (1938).

Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl, 1938.

© Olympia-Film/Kobal/Shutterstock.com

The situation was similar in Italy, where popular genre films as well as historical epics carried the messages of the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. Italy also sought to strengthen its film culture during this era by establishing a national film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (founded 1935; “Experimental Centre of Cinematography”), and a major new studio complex in Rome, Cinecittà (opened 1937). Both of these institutions continued in operation after World War II and played a significant role in subsequent film history.

Soviet Union

Although the Soviet engineers P.G. Tager and A.F. Shorin had designed optical sound systems as early as 1927, neither was workable until 1929. Sound was slow in reaching the Soviet Union: most Soviet transitional films were technically inferior to those of the West, and Soviet filmmakers continued to make silent films until the mid-1930s. As in Germany and Italy, however, sound reemphasized film’s propaganda value, and, through the authoritarian government’s policy of Socialist Realism, the Soviet cinema became an instrument of mass indoctrination as never before. The filmmakers most affected by the new policy were the great montage artists of the 1920s. Each of them made admirable attempts to experiment with sound—Lev Kuleshov’s The Great Consoler (1933), Dziga Vertov’s Symphony of the Donbas (1931) and Three Songs About Lenin (1934), Sergei Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow (1935; terminated by Boris Shumyatsky in midproduction), Vsevolod Pudovkin’s A Simple Case (1932) and Deserter (1933), and Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Ivan (1932)—but their work was ultimately suppressed or defamed by the party bureaucracy. Only Eisenstein was powerful enough to reassert his genius: in the nationalistic epic Alexander Nevsky (1938), whose contrapuntal sound track is a classic of its kind, and in the operatically stylized Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (1944–46), a veiled critique of Stalin’s autocracy. Most of the films produced at the time were propaganda glorifying national heroes.

Japan

In Japan, as in the Soviet Union, the conversion to sound was a slow process: in 1932 only 45 of 400 features were made with sound, and silent films continued to be produced in large numbers until 1937. The main reason for the slow conversion was that Japanese motion pictures had “talked” since their inception through the mediation of a benshi, a commentator who stood to the side of the screen and narrated the action for the audience in the manner of Kabuki theatre. The arrival of recorded sound liberated the Japanese cinema from its dependence on live narrators and was resisted by the benshi, many of whom were stars in their own right and possessed considerable box-office appeal. In the end, however, Japan’s conversion to sound was complete.

As in the United States, the introduction of sound enabled the major Japanese film companies (Nikkatsu, founded 1912; Shochiku, 1920; Toho, c. 1935) to acquire smaller companies and form vertical monopolies controlling production, distribution, and exhibition. Production procedures were standardized and structured for the mass production of motion pictures, and the studios increased their efficiency by specializing in either jidai-geki, period films set before 1868 (the year marking the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, 1868–1912, and the abolition of the feudal shogunate), or gendai-geki, films of contemporary life, set any time thereafter. Although, as a matter of geopolitical circumstance, there was hardly any export market for Japanese films prior to World War II, the domestic popularity of sound films enabled the Japanese motion-picture industry to become one of the most prolific in the world, releasing 400 films annually to the nation’s 2,500 theatres. Most of these films had no purpose other than entertainment, but in the late 1930s, as the government became increasingly expansionist and militaristic, Japan’s major directors turned to works of social criticism called “tendency” films, such as Ozu Yasujirō’s Hitori musuko (The Only Son, 1936) and Mizoguchi Kenji’s Naniwa hika (Osaka Elegy, 1936) and Gion no shimai (Sisters of the Gion, 1936). In response the government imposed a strict code of censorship that was retained throughout the war.

India

In India, sound created a major industrial boom by reviving a popular 19th-century theatrical form: the folk-music drama based on centuries-old religious myths. Despite the fact that films had to be produced in as many as 10 regional languages, the popularity of these “all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing” mythologicals or historicals played an enormous role in winning acceptance for sound throughout the subcontinent and in encouraging the growth of the Indian film industry. An average of 230 features were released per year throughout the 1930s, almost all for domestic consumption.

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The War Years And Post-World War II Trends

Decline of the Hollywood studios

During the U.S. involvement in World War II, the Hollywood film industry cooperated closely with the government to support its war-aims information campaign. Following the declaration of war on Japan, the government created a Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs to coordinate the production of entertainment features with patriotic, morale-boosting themes and messages about the “American way of life,” the nature of the enemy and the allies, civilian responsibility on the home front, and the fighting forces themselves. Initially unsophisticated vehicles for xenophobia and jingoism with titles such as The Devil with Hitler and Blondie for Victory (both 1942), Hollywood’s wartime films became increasingly serious as the war dragged on (Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die, Jean Renoir’s This Land Is Mine, Tay Garnett’s Bataan, all 1943; Delmer Daves’s Destination Tokyo, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, Lewis Milestone’s The Purple Heart, all 1944; Milestone’s A Walk in the Sun, 1946). In addition to commercial features, several Hollywood directors produced documentaries for government and military agencies. Among the best-known of these films, which were designed to explain the war to both servicemen and civilians, are Frank Capra’s seven-part series Why We Fight (1942–44), John Ford’s The Battle of Midway (1942), William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle (1944), and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro (1944). The last three were shot on location and were made especially effective by their immediacy.

Lifeboat

Tallulah Bankhead in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944).

20th Century Fox/The Kobal Collection

When World War II ended, the American film industry seemed to be in an ideal position. Full-scale mobilization had ended the Depression domestically, and victory had opened vast, unchallenged markets in the war-torn economies of western Europe and Japan. Furthermore, from 1942 through 1945, Hollywood had experienced the most stable and lucrative three years in its history, and in 1946, when two-thirds of the American population went to the movies at least once a week, the studios earned record-breaking profits. The euphoria ended quickly, however, as inflation and labour unrest boosted domestic production costs and as important foreign markets, including Britain and Italy, were temporarily lost to protectionist quotas. The industry was more severely weakened in 1948, when a federal antitrust suit against the five major and three minor studios ended in the “Paramount decrees,” which forced the studios to divest themselves of their theatre chains and mandated competition in the exhibition sector for the first time in 30 years. Finally, the advent of network television broadcasting in the 1940s provided Hollywood with its first real competition for American leisure time by offering consumers “movies in the home.”

The American film industry’s various problems and the nation’s general postwar disillusionment generated several new film types in the late 1940s. Although the studios continued to produce traditional genre films, such as westerns and musicals, their financial difficulties encouraged them to make realistic small-scale dramas rather than fantastic lavish epics. Instead of depending on spectacle and special effects to create excitement, the new lower-budget films tried to develop thought-provoking or perverse stories reflecting the psychological and social problems besetting returning war veterans and others adapting to postwar life. Some of the American cinema’s grimmest and most naturalistic films were produced during this period, including those of the so-called social consciousness cycle, which attempted to deal realistically with such endemic problems as racism (Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947; Alfred Werker’s Lost Boundaries, 1949), alcoholism (Stuart Heisler’s Smash-Up, 1947), and mental illness (Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit, 1948); the semidocumentary melodrama, which reconstructed true criminal cases and was often shot on location (Kazan’s Boomerang, 1947; Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death, 1947); and the film noir, whose dark, fatalistic interpretations of contemporary American reality are unique in the industry’s history (Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946; Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, 1947; Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, 1947; Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil, 1948).

Out of the Past

Robert Mitchum and Virginia Huston in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947).

RKO/Kobal Collection/Shutterstock.com

The fear of communism

Film content was next influenced strongly by the fear of communism that pervaded the United States during the late 1940s and early ’50s. Anticommunist “witch-hunts” began in Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) decided to investigate communist influence in movies. More than 100 witnesses, including many of Hollywood’s most talented and popular artists, were called before the committee to answer questions about their own and their associates’ alleged communist affiliations. On November 24, 1947, a group of eight screenwriters and two directors, later known as the Hollywood Ten, were sentenced to serve up to a year in prison for refusing to testify. That evening the members of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, which included the leading studio heads, published what became known as the Waldorf Declaration, in which they fired the members of the Hollywood Ten and expressed their support of HUAC. The studios, afraid to antagonize already shrinking audiences, then initiated an unofficial policy of blacklisting, refusing to employ any person even suspected of having communist associations. Hundreds of people were fired from the industry, and many creative artists were never able to work in Hollywood again. Throughout the blacklisting era, filmmakers refrained from making any but the most conservative motion pictures; controversial topics or new ideas were carefully avoided. The resulting creative stagnation, combined with financial difficulties, contributed significantly to the demise of the studio system, although, paradoxically, the actions that the studios took between 1952 and 1965, including the practice of blacklisting, can be viewed as an attempt to halt the industry’s decline.

Dalton Trumbo; Hollywood Ten

Dalton Trumbo (fourth from left) surrounded by supporters as he waits to board an airplane on his way to federal prison in 1950 for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com

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The threat of television

The film industry believed that the greatest threat to its continued success was posed by television, especially in light of the Paramount decrees. The studios seemed to be losing their control of the nation’s theatres at the same time that exhibitors were losing their audiences to television. The studios therefore attempted to diminish television’s appeal by exploiting the two obvious advantages that film enjoyed over the new medium—the size of its images and, at a time when all television broadcasting was in black and white, the ability to produce photographic colour. (In the 1952–53 season, the ability to produce multiple-track stereophonic sound joined this list.) In the late 1940s, fewer than 12 percent of Hollywood features were produced in colour, primarily because of the expense of three-strip Technicolor filming. In 1950, however, a federal consent decree dissolved the Technicolor Corporation’s de facto monopoly on the process, and Kodak simultaneously introduced a new multilayered film stock in which emulsions sensitive to the red, green, and blue parts of the spectrum were bonded together on a single roll. Patented as Eastmancolor, this “integral tri-pack” process offered excellent colour resolution at a low cost because it could be used with conventional cameras. Its availability hastened the industry’s conversion to full colour production. By 1954 more than 50 percent of American features were made in colour, and the figure reached 94 percent by 1970.

The aspect ratio (the ratio of width to height) of the projected motion-picture image had been standardized at 1.33 to 1 since 1932, but, as television eroded the film industry’s domestic audience, the studios increased screen size as a way of attracting audiences back into theatres. For both optical and architectural reasons this change in size usually meant increased width, not increased height. Early experiments with multiple-camera wide-screen (Cinerama, 1952) and stereoscopic 3-D (Natural Vision, 1952) provoked audience interest, but it was an anamorphic process called CinemaScope that prompted the wide-screen revolution. Introduced by Twentieth Century–Fox in the biblical epic The Robe (1953), CinemaScope used an anamorphic lens to squeeze a wide-angle image onto conventional 35-mm film stock and a similar lens to restore the image’s original width in projection. CinemaScope’s aspect ratio was 2.55 to 1, and the system had the great advantage of requiring no special cameras, film stock, or projectors. By the end of 1954, every Hollywood studio but Paramount had leased a version of the process from Fox (Paramount adopted a nonanamorphic process called VistaVision that exposed double-frame images by running film through special cameras and projectors horizontally rather than vertically), and many studios were experimenting with wide-gauge film systems (e.g., Todd-AO, 1955; Panavision-70, 1960) that required special equipment but eliminated the distortion inherent in the anamorphic process.

Like the coming of sound, the conversion to wide-screen formats produced an initial regression as filmmakers learned how to compose and edit their images for the new elongated frame. Sound had promoted the rise of aurally intensive genres such as the musical and the gangster film, and the wide-screen format similarly created a bias in favour of visually spectacular subjects and epic scale. The emergence of the three- to four-hour wide-screen “blockbuster” in such films as War and Peace, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Ten Commandments in 1956 coincided with the era’s affinity for safe and sanitized material. Given the political paranoia of the times, few subjects could be treated seriously, and the studios concentrated on presenting traditional genre fare—westerns, musicals, comedies, and blockbusters—suitable for wide-screen treatment. Only a director like Hitchcock, whose style was oblique and imagist, could prosper in such a climate. He produced his greatest work during the period, much of it in VistaVision (Rear Window, 1954; The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956; Vertigo, 1958; North by Northwest, 1959; Psycho, 1960; The Birds, 1963).

Rear Window

Grace Kelly and James Stewart in Rear Window (1954).

In spite of the major film companies’ elaborate strategies of defense, they continued to decline throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Because they could no longer dominate the exhibition sector, they faced serious competition for the first time from independent and foreign filmmakers. “Runaway” productions (films made away from the studios, frequently abroad, to take advantage of lower costs) became common, and the Production Code was dissolved as a series of federal court decisions between 1952 and 1958 extended First Amendment protection to motion pictures. As their incomes shrank, the major companies’ vast studios and backlots became liabilities that ultimately crippled them. The minor companies, however, owned modest studio facilities and had lost nothing by the Paramount decrees because they controlled no theatres. They were thus able to prosper during this era, eventually becoming major companies themselves in the 1970s.

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Cinema around the world

Italy

World War II physically and economically devastated the film industries of the Soviet Union, Japan, and most European nations. Italy’s early surrender, however, left its facilities relatively intact, enabling the Italian cinema to lead the post-World War II film renaissance with its development of the Neorealist movement. Although it had roots in both Soviet expressive realism and French poetic realism, Neorealism was decidedly national in focus, taking as its subject the day-to-day reality of a country traumatized by political upheaval and war.

Most of the major figures in the Neorealist movement had studied at Mussolini’s Centro Sperimentale, but they vigorously rejected the stagy, artificial style associated with the telefono bianco films in favour of a Marxist aesthetic of everyday life. The first identifiable Neorealist film was Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1942; Obsession), a bleak contemporary melodrama shot on location in the countryside around Ferrara. It was suppressed by the fascist censors, however, so international audiences were first introduced to the movement through Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (1945; Open City), which was shot on location in the streets of Rome only two months after Italy’s surrender. The film featured both professional and nonprofessional actors and focused on ordinary people caught up in contemporary events. Its documentary texture, postrecorded sound track, and improvisational quality became the hallmark of the Neorealist movement. Rossellini followed it with Paisà (1946; Paisan) and Germania, anno zero (1947; Germany, Year Zero) to complete his “war trilogy.” Visconti’s second contribution to Neorealism was La terra trema (1948; The Earth Trembles), an epic of peasant life that was shot on location in a Sicilian fishing village. In many respects it is more exemplary of the movement than Ossessione, and it is widely regarded as a masterpiece. Neorealism’s third major director was Vittorio De Sica, who worked in close collaboration with scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, the movement’s major theorist and spokesman. De Sica’s films sometimes tend toward sentimentality, but in Sciuscià (1946; Shoeshine), Ladri di biciclette (1948; The Bicycle Thief), and Umberto D. (1952), he produced works central to the movement.

scene from Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief)

Lamberto Maggiorani (centre) and Enzo Staiola (right) in Ladri di biciclette (1948; The Bicycle Thief), directed by Vittorio De Sica.

From a private collection

Neorealism was the first postwar cinema to reject Hollywood’s narrative conventions and studio production techniques, and, as such, it had enormous influence on future movements such as British Social Realism, Brazilian Cinema Nôvo, and French and Czech New Wave. It also heralded the practices of shooting on location using natural lighting and postsynchronizing sound that later became standard in the film industry. Despite its influence, in the 1950s Neorealism disappeared as a distinct national movement, together with the socioeconomic context that had produced it, as the Marshall Plan began to work its “economic miracle” in Europe. Italian cinema nevertheless remained prominent through the films of several gifted directors who began their careers as Neorealists and went on to produce their major work during the 1960s and ’70s.

Federico Fellini had worked as a scriptwriter for Rossellini before directing in the 1950s an impressive series of films whose form was Neorealist but whose content was allegorical (I vitelloni [The Loafers], 1953; La strada [The Road], 1954; Le notti di Cabiria [Nights of Cabiria], 1956). During the 1960s Fellini’s work became increasingly surrealistic (La dolce vita [The Sweet Life], 1960; Otto e mezzo [81/2], 1963; Giulietta degli spiriti [Juliet of the Spirits], 1965; Fellini Satyricon, 1969), and by the 1970s he was perceived to be a flamboyant ironic fantasist—a reputation that sustained him through such serious and successful films as Fellini Roma (1972), Amarcord (1974), and E la nave va (1983; And the Ship Sails On).

Otto e mezzo (8 1/2)

Scene from Otto e mezzo (1963; 8 1/2), directed by Federico Fellini.

Michelangelo Antonioni had also collaborated with Rossellini. Accordingly, his first films were Neorealist documentary shorts (Gente del Po [People of the Po], 1947), but during the 1950s he turned increasingly to an examination of the Italian bourgeoisie in such films as Cronaca di un amore (1950; Story of a Love Affair), La signora senza camelie (1953; Camille Without Camellias), and Le amiche (1955; The Girlfriends), and in the early 1960s Antonioni produced a trilogy on the malaise of the middle class that made him internationally famous. In L’avventura (1959; The Adventure), La notte (1960; The Night), and L’eclisse (1962; The Eclipse), he used long-take sequence shots equating film time with real time to create a vision of the reverberating emptiness of modern urban life. Antonioni then began to use colour expressionistically in Deserto rosso (1964; Red Desert) and Blow-Up (1966) to convey alienation and abstraction from human feeling, and all of his later works in some way concerned the breakdown of personal relationships (Zabriskie Point, 1970; Identificazione di una donna [Identification of a Woman], 1982) and of identity itself (Professione: Reporter [The Passenger], 1975).

scene from L'eclisse

Monica Vitti (left) in L'eclisse (1962; The Eclipse), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

Cineriz/Interopa Film/Paris Film; photograph from a private collection

While Fellini and Antonioni were putting Italy in the vanguard of modernist cinema, the country’s second post-World War II generation of directors emerged. Ermanno Olmi (Il posto [The Job], 1961; Un certo giorno [One Fine Day], 1968; L’albero degli zoccoli [The Tree of Wooden Clogs], 1979) continued the Neorealist tradition in his tales of ordinary people caught up in systems beyond their comprehension. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had worked as a scriptwriter for Fellini, achieved international recognition for Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964; The Gospel According to St. Matthew), a brilliant semidocumentary reconstruction of the life of Christ with Marxist overtones. Pasolini went on to direct a series of astonishing, often outrageous films that set forth a Marxist interpretation of history and myth—Edipo re (1967; Oedipus Rex), Teorema (1968; Theorem), Porcile (1969; Pigsty), Medea (1969), Salò (1975)—before his murder in 1975. Like Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci was a Marxist intellectual whose films attempt to correlate sexuality, ideology, and history; his most successful films were Il conformista (1970; The Conformist), a striking dissection of the psychopathology of fascism, Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972; Last Tango in Paris), a meditation on sex and death, and Novecento (1976; 1900), a six-hour epic covering 50 years of Italian class conflict. Other important Italian filmmakers include Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano, 1962), Marco Bellocchio (La Cina è vicina [China Is Near], 1967), Marco Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe [Blow-Out], 1973), Ettore Scola (Una giornata speciale [A Special Day], 1977), Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani (Padre padrone [Father and Master], 1977), Franco Brusati (Dimenticare Venezia [To Forget Venice], 1979), and Lina Wertmüller (Pasqualino settebellezze [Seven Beauties], 1976).

Beginning in the 1970s, the declining European economy compelled many Italian directors to make coproductions with American, French, German, and Swedish companies. In order to maximize profits, several such films featured international stars in leading roles. This dependence on world markets—as well as the increased popularity of television throughout Italy—often led to the loss of national identity in Italian films, although such filmmakers as Roberto Benigni, Carlo Verdone, and Maurizio Nichetti were able to use the new situation to good advantage. Perhaps the most individual voice in Italian cinema during the 1990s was Nanni Moretti, whose humourous, satiric works, such as Caro diario (1994; Dear Diary), critique the social values of the late 20th century. Moretti’s family drama La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room) won the top award at the 2001 Cannes film festival.

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France

French cinema of the occupation and postwar era produced many fine films (Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis [The Children of Paradise], 1945; Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête [Beauty and the Beast], 1946; René Clément’s Jeux interdits [Forbidden Games], 1952; Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or [Golden Helmet], 1952; Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Salaire de la peur [The Wages of Fear], 1953), but their mode of presentation relied heavily on script and was predominantly literary. There were exceptions in the austere classicism of Robert Bresson (Le Journal d’un curé de campagne [The Diary of a Country Priest], 1950; Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé [A Man Escaped], 1956), the absurdist comedy of Jacques Tati (Les Vacances de M. Hulot [Mr. Hulot’s Holiday], 1953; Mon oncle [My Uncle], 1958), and the lush, magnificently stylized masterworks of the German émigré Max Ophüls, whose La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), Madame de… (1953), and Lola Montès (1955) represent significant contributions to world cinema. An independent documentary movement, which produced such landmark nonfiction films as Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (1948), Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (1949; The Blood of the Beasts), and Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (1956; Night and Fog), also emerged at this time. It provided a training ground for young directors outside the traditional industry system and influenced the independent production style of the movement that culminated in the French postwar period of renewal—the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave.

La Ronde

Simone Signoret and Gérard Philipe in La Ronde (1950), directed by Max Ophüls.

Svanfilm; photograph from a private collection

The most important source of the New Wave lay in the theoretical writings of Alexandre Astruc and, more prominently, of André Bazin, whose thought molded an entire generation of filmmakers, critics, and scholars. In 1948 Astruc formulated the concept of the caméra-stylo (“camera-pen”), in which film was regarded as a form of audiovisual language and the filmmaker, therefore, as a kind of writer in light. Bazin’s influential journal Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951, elaborated this notion and became the headquarters of a group of young cinéphiles (“film lovers”)—the critics François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer—who were to become the major directors of the New Wave. Bazin’s basic principle was a rejection of montage aesthetics—both radical Eisensteinian cutting and Hollywood-style continuity, or invisible, editing—in favour of the long take and composition in depth, or what he called mise-en-scène. Borrowed from the theatre, this term literally means “the placing in the scene,” but Bazin used it to designate such elements of filmic structure as camera placement and movement, the lighting of shots, and blocking of action—that is, everything that precedes the editing process.

The Cahiers critics embraced mise-en-scène aesthetics and borrowed the idea of authorship from Astruc. In proposing la politique des auteurs (“the policy of authors”), christened the auteur theory by the American critic Andrew Sarris, they maintained that film should be a medium of personal artistic expression and that the best films are those imprinted with their makers’ individual signature. As a logical consequence of this premise, the Cahiers critics rejected mainstream French cinema and its “tradition of quality” in favour of the classic mise-en-scène tradition (exemplified in the films of Louis Feuillade, F.W. Murnau, Erich von Stroheim, Renoir, Welles, and Ophüls), the films of Hollywood studio directors who had transcended the constraints of the system to make personal films (Howard Hawks, Josef von Sternberg, Hitchcock, and Ford), and the low-budget American B movie in which the director usually had total control over production.

The first films of the New Wave were independently produced dramatic shorts shot in 16-mm by the Cahiers critics in 1956–57, but 1959 was the year that brought the movement to international prominence, when each of its three major figures made their first features. Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour, and Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless) were all in their different ways paradigms of a fresh new style based on elliptical editing and location shooting with handheld cameras. This style was both radically destructive of classic Hollywood continuity and pragmatically suited to the New Wave’s need to make its films quickly and cheaply. Its ultimate effect was to deconstruct the narrative language that had evolved over the previous 60 years and to create a reflexive cinema, or meta-cinema, whose techniques provided a continuous comment on its own making.

scene from Breathless

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless (1960), directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

The critical and commercial success of the first New Wave features produced an unprecedented creative explosion within the French industry. Between 1960 and 1964, literally hundreds of low-budget, stylistically experimental films were made by cinéphiles with little or no experience. Many of these ended in failure, and the New Wave as a collective phenomenon was over by 1965. But the three figures who had initiated the movement, and a small group of sophisticated and talented filmmakers—Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Louis Malle, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Demy—dominated French cinema until well into the 1970s, and several continued to make significant contributions into the next century.

François Truffaut was the most commercially successful of the original New Wave group, and, through such films as Jules et Jim (1961) and the autobiographical “Antoine Doinel” series, which began with Les Quatre Cents Coups, he acquired a reputation as a romantic ironist. Truffaut’s range also extended to parodies of Hollywood genres (Tirez sur le pianiste [Shoot the Piano Player], 1960), homages to Hitchcock (La Mariée était en noir [The Bride Wore Black], 1967), historical reconstructions (L’Enfant sauvage [The Wild Child], 1970), reflexive narratives (La Nuit américaine [Day for Night], 1973), and literary adaptations (L’Histoire d’Adèle H. [The Story of Adele H.], 1975; Le Dernier Métro [The Last Metro], 1980).

Day for Night

Jean-Pierre Léaud and Jacqueline Bisset in La Nuit américaine (1973; Day for Night), which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.

Les Films du Carrosse/PECF/PIC

Jean-Luc Godard was the most stylistically and politically radical of the early New Wave directors. Some of his early films were parodies of Hollywood genres (Une Femme est une femme [A Woman Is a Woman], 1961; Alphaville, 1965; Pierrot le fou, 1965), but the majority of them treated political and social themes from a Marxist, and finally Maoist, perspective (Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier], 1960; Vivre sa vie [My Life to Live], 1962; Les Carabiniers [The Riflemen], 1963; Bande à part [Band of Outsiders], 1964; Une Femme mariée [A Married Woman], 1964). With Masculin féminin (1966), Godard turned from narrative to cinema verité-style essay, and his later films became increasingly ideological and structurally random (Made in U.S.A., 1966; Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle [Two or Three Things I Know About Her], 1967; La Chinoise, 1967; Week-end, 1967; One Plus One [also called Sympathy for the Devil], 1968). During the 1970s, Godard made films for the radical Dziga Vertov production collective (Pravda, 1969; Le Vent d’est [Wind from the East], 1969; Letter to Jane, 1972) and experimented with combinations of film and videotape (Numéro deux [Number Two], 1975; La Communication, 1976). In the 1980s Godard returned to theatrical filmmaking, purified of ideology but no less controversial for it, with such provocative features as Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980; Every Man for Himself), Passion (1982), Je vous salue, Marie (1986; Hail Mary), and Éloge de l’amour (2001; In Praise of Love).

Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky in La Chinoise

Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky in La Chinoise (1967), directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

Leacock Pennebaker, Inc.; photograph from a private collection

Alain Resnais was slightly older than the Cahiers group, but he identified with the New Wave through style and theme. His most famous film is the postmodern mystery L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961; Last Year at Marienbad), which

questions the processes of thought and memory—central concerns in Resnais’s work. Muriel (1963), La Guerre est finie (1966; The War Is Over), Stavisky (1974), Providence (1977), and Mon oncle d’Amérique (1978; My American Uncle) are all in various ways concerned with the effects of time on human memory from both a historical and a personal perspective.

scene from Alain Resnais's Providence

(From far left) Ellen Burstyn, John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, and David Warner in Providence (1977), directed by Alain Resnais.

Cinema 5; photograph from a private collection

Other important New Wave figures with lasting influence are Claude Chabrol, whose entire career can be seen as an extended homage to Hitchcock; Louis Malle, a master of film types who relocated to the United States; Eric Rohmer, whose “moral tales,” including Ma nuit chez Maud (1968; My Night at Maud’s) and Le Genou de Claire (1970; Claire’s Knee), established the ironic perspective on human passion that he maintained in later films; Agnès Varda, famed for her improvisational style; Jacques Demy, whose best films are homages to the Hollywood musical; and Jacques Rivette, the most austerely abstract and experimental of the Cahiers group.

Une Affaire de femmes

Isabelle Huppert (centre) in Une Affaire de femmes (1988; Story of Women), directed by Claude Chabrol.

Mk2/Films A2/Films Du Camelia/Kobal/Shutterstock.com

Few national movements have influenced international cinema as strongly as the French New Wave. By promoting the concept of personal authorship, its directors demonstrated that film is an audiovisual language that can be crafted into “novels” and “essays”; and, by deconstructing classic Hollywood conventions, they added dimensions to this language that made it capable of expressing a new range of internal and external states. In the process, the New Wave helped to reinvigorate the stylistically moribund cinemas then found in Britain, West Germany, and the United States; it created a current of “second waves” and “third waves” in the already flourishing Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Japanese cinemas.

The New Wave made France the leading centre of Modernist and postmodern film and film theory, a position it continued to hold for many years. By the 1990s France had followed the lead of other European countries in assimilating into the world market. The influence of the New Wave was still evident, but increased demands for commercial fare resulted in several crime thrillers and period costume dramas, genres that were often specialties of young directors.

Unique among European filmmakers, however, many French directors remained unfettered by commercial demands. At the turn of the 21st century, Chabrol was still a dominant force, with films such as La Cérémonie (1995; Judgment in Stone) demonstrating his continued mastery of the psychological thriller. Prominent young directors included Manuel Poirier, who specialized in affectionate, offbeat romances and “buddy pictures,” such as Western (1997); Claire Simon, who, after several years of directing documentaries, adapted her characteristic ironic humour to such fiction films as Sinon, oui (1997; A Foreign Body) and Ça c’est vraiment toi (2000; That’s Just like You); and Robert Guédiguian, a writer-producer-director known for works such as Marius et Jeannette (1997) and Á la place du coeur (1998), which effectively blend affectionate character studies with biting social satire.

Great Britain

In Great Britain the post-World War II cinema was even more literary than in France, relying heavily on the adaptation of classics in the work of such directors as Laurence Olivier (Henry V, 1944; Hamlet, 1948; Richard III, 1955), David Lean (Great Expectations, 1946; Oliver Twist, 1948), and Anthony Asquith (The Importance of Being Earnest, 1952). Even less-conventional films had literary sources (Carol Reed’s Outcast of the Islands, 1951; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger’s The Red Shoes, 1948, and The Tales of Hoffman, 1951). There were exceptions to this trend in a series of witty, irreverent comedies made for Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios (Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1949; The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951; The Man in the White Suit, 1951), most of them starring Alec Guinness, but, on the whole, British postwar cinema was elitist and culturally conservative.

Great Expectations

Martita Hunt in Great Expectations (1946), directed by David Lean.

In reaction, a younger generation of filmmakers led by Lindsay Anderson, Czechoslovak-born Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson organized the Free Cinema movement in the mid-1950s. Its purpose was to produce short low-budget documentaries illuminating problems of contemporary life (Anderson’s O Dreamland, 1953; Richardson’s Momma Don’t Allow, 1955). Grounded in the ideology and practice of Neorealism, Free Cinema emerged simultaneously with a larger social movement assailing the British class structure and calling for the replacement of bourgeois elitism with liberal working-class values. In the cinema this antiestablishment agitation resulted in the New Cinema, or Social Realist, movement signaled by Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), the first British postwar feature with a working-class protagonist and proletarian themes. Stylistically influenced by the New Wave, with which it was concurrent, the Social Realist film was generally shot in black and white on location in the industrial Midlands and cast with unknown young actors and actresses. Like the New Wave films, Social Realist films were independently produced on low budgets (many of them for Woodfall Film Productions, the company founded in 1958 by Richardson and playwright John Osborne, one of the principal Angry Young Men, to adapt the latter’s Look Back in Anger), but their freshness of both content and form attracted an international audience. Some of the most famous were Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963), Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963), and Reisz’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966).

lobby card for Look Back in Anger

Lobby card for Look Back in Anger (1959), starring Richard Burton.

Woodfall Film Productions

These films and others like them brought such prestige to the British film industry that London briefly became the production capital of the Western world, delivering such homegrown international hits as Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), Schlesinger’s Darling (1965), Richard Lester’s two Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), and Anderson’s If… (1968), as well as such foreign importations as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), and American Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971). This activity inspired a new, more visually oriented generation of British filmmakers—Peter Yates, John Boorman, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, and Ridley Scott—who would make their mark in the 1970s; but, as England’s economy began its precipitous decline during that decade, so too did its film industry. Many British directors and performers defected to Hollywood, while the English-language film market simultaneously experienced a vigorous and unprecedented challenge from Australia. In the 1980s, amid widespread speculation about the collapse of the film industry, British annual production reached an all-time low.

Great Britain’s film industry, however, has a long history of rebounding from periods of crisis. A major factor in the revival of British cinema during the late 20th century was the founding in 1982 of Channel 4, a television network devoted to commissioning—rather than merely producing—original films. Its success led to the establishment of a subsidiary, FilmFour Ltd., in 1998. Internationally acclaimed films produced or coproduced under either the Channel 4 or the FilmFour banner include A Room with a View (1986), The Crying Game (1992), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Trainspotting (1996), Secrets and Lies (1996), The Full Monty (1997), and Welcome to Sarajevo (1997). Also contributing to the resurgence of British film was the National Lottery, which, after its establishment in 1994, annually contributed millions of pounds to the film industry.

Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands in A Room with a View

Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands in A Room with a View (1985), directed by James Ivory.

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Germany

Germany’s catastrophic defeat in World War II and the subsequent partitioning of the country virtually destroyed its film industry, which had already been corrupted by the Nazis. Rebuilt during the 1950s, the West German industry became the fifth largest producer in the world, but the majority of its output consisted of low-quality Heimatfilme (“homeland films”) for the domestic market. When this market collapsed in the 1960s because of changing demographic patterns and the diffusion of television, the industry was forced to turn to the federal government for subsidies. In recognition of the crisis, 26 writers and filmmakers at the Oberhausen film festival in 1962 drafted a manifesto proclaiming the death of German cinema and demanding the establishment of a junger deutscher Film, a “young German cinema.” The members of this Oberhausen group became the founders of Das Neue Kino, or the New German Cinema, which was brought into being over the next decade through the establishment of the Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (1965; Young German Film Board, a grant agency with funding drawn from the cultural budgets of the federal states), the Filmförderungsanstalt, or FFA (Film Subsidies Board, which generated production funds by levying a federal tax in part on theatre tickets), and the independent distributing company Filmverlag der Autoren (1971; Authors’ Film-Publishing Group), with additional funding from the two West German television networks.

These institutions made it possible for a new generation of German filmmakers to produce their first features and established a vital new cinema for West Germany that attempted to examine the nation’s unbewältige Vergangenheit, or “unassimilated past.” The first such films, which were deeply influenced by the New Wave, especially by the work of Godard, included Volker Schlöndorff’s Der junge Törless (1966; Young Torless) and Alexander Kluge’s Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (1968; The Artists Under the Big Top: Disoriented). In the 1970s, however, three major figures emerged as leaders of the movement—Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders.

Fassbinder was the most prolific, having made more than 40 features before he died in 1982. His films are also the most flamboyant. Nearly all of them take the form of extreme melodrama, ending in murder or suicide—Warum läuft Herr R. amok? (1969; Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?), Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972; The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), and Angst essen Seele auf (1973; Ali: Fear Eats the Soul)—and several are consciously focused on German wartime and postwar society (Die Ehe der Maria Braun [The Marriage of Maria Braun], 1979; Lola, 1981; Veronika Voss, 1982).

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder acting in Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975; Fox and His Friends), which he also directed and cowrote.

Herzog’s films tended more toward the mystical and the spiritual than the social, although there is nearly always some contemporary referent in his work—the image of idealism turned to barbarism in Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972; Aguirre, the Wrath of God); the hopeless inability of science to address the human condition in Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1974; Every Man for Himself and God Against All, or The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser); the inherently destructive nature of technology in Herz aus Glas (1977; Heart of Glass); the incomprehensible nature of pestilence in his remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu (1979).

Wenders, on the other hand, was profoundly postmodern in his contemplation of alienation through spatial metaphor. In such works of existential questing as Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1971; The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) and Im Lauf der Zeit (1976; “In the Course of Time”; Kings of the Road), he addressed the universal phenomena of dislocation and rootlessness that afflict modern society.

The state subsidy system enabled hundreds of filmmakers, including many women (e.g., Margarethe von Trotta) and minorities, to participate in the New German Cinema. With the exception of the work of Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders, however, the New German Cinema did not find a large audience outside West Germany. Yet in terms of exploring and extending the audio-language system of film, it was to the 1970s and ’80s very much what the New Wave was to the ’60s, and its influence was widely felt.

By the reunification of Germany in 1990, a national identity had still not been forged in any of the various arts. Several outstanding German directors and production artists did emerge, but most of them achieved their greatest success in Hollywood. Roland Emerich (Independence Day, 1996; The Patriot, 2000) proved to be a skillful practitioner of the action-adventure genre, and Wolfgang Petersen, who received international acclaim for Das Boot (1982), earned a reputation for tense thrillers (In the Line of Fire, 1993) and unrelenting visual spectacles (The Perfect Storm, 2000). German cinematographers (Michael Ballhaus, Karl Walter Lindenlaub) and composers (Hans Zimmer, Christopher Franke) were also among the more notable artisans working in Hollywood films at the turn of the 21st century.

Africa

The development of an indigenous film culture in Africa occurred at different moments in the history of the continent. The various timelines are related to the political, social, and economic situations in each country and to the varying effects of colonialism on the continent. Only Egypt had a truly active film industry for the first half of the 20th century; the development of cinema elsewhere on the continent was largely the result of individual efforts. One such example is Paul Soumanou Vieyra, the first African graduate of the French film school Institut des Hautes Études Ciné, who joined with friends to produce the short film Afrique sur Seine (1955), considered the first fiction film by black Africans.

Some countries, such as Morocco, did not develop a strong national cinema; others, such as Algeria and Tunisia, nationalized all or parts of their film industries. Several African nations joined the Fédération Pan-Africaine des Cinéastes (FEPACI; “Federation of Pan-African Filmmakers”), formed in 1969 to oversee the political and financial problems of the film industries throughout the continent.

As the 20th century drew to a close, many filmmakers and scholars began to examine the questions of, first, what constitutes an “African film” and, second, how film can best deal with the diaspora of the African people. On one hand, African filmmakers had to acknowledge and learn from the conventions of Western film. On the other, they wanted to highlight and preserve aspects of African culture that had been threatened by Western colonialism. As part of this search to define the goals of African cinema, African filmmakers often used the medium to explore the social issues plaguing postcolonial Africa. Directors such as Adama Drabo (Ta Dona [Fire], 1991) and Moufida Tlatli (Les Silences du palais [The Silences of the Palace], 1994) explored such matters as education, the environment, and women’s rights and suggested that traditional approaches to such issues had to be adapted to the realities of contemporary Africa. Aspects of these realities were examined by such directors as Tsitsi Dangarembga (Everyone’s Child, 1996) and Salem Mekuria (Ye Wonz Maibel [Deluge], 1995), who dealt with the AIDS crisis and political violence, respectively. Colonization itself was examined by such directors as Bassek ba Kobhio, whose satiric study of Albert Schweitzer, Le Grand Blanc de Lambaréné (1995; The Great White Man of Lambaréné), shows how colonialism damaged both the colonizer and the colonized.

Japan

Although more than half of Japan’s theatres were destroyed by U.S. bombing during World War II, most of its studio facilities were left intact. Japan, therefore, continued to produce films in quantity during the Allied occupation (1945–52). Many traditional Japanese subjects were forbidden by the Allied Command as promoting feudalism, however, including all films classified as jidai-geki (period dramas). Nevertheless, the film that first brought Japanese cinema to international attention belonged to that category: Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon (1950), which won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice film festival. The film, a meditation on the nature of truth set in the medieval past, marked the beginning of the Japanese cinema’s unprecedented renaissance . During this period, new export markets opened in the West, and Japanese filmmakers produced some of their finest work, winning festival awards throughout the world. Kurosawa, who was already well known in his homeland for a number of wartime and postwar genre films, became the most famous Japanese director in the West on the strength of his masterful samurai epics—Shichinin no samurai (1954; Seven Samurai), Kumonosu-jo (1957; Throne of Blood), Kakushi toride no san akunin (1958; The Hidden Fortress), Yojimbo (1961), and Sanjuro (1962)—which raised the chambara, or “sword-fight,” film to the status of art. He made films in other genres, including literary adaptations, gendai-geki (modern dramas), gangster films, and period films that cannot be categorized at all (Akahige [Red Beard], 1965; Dersu Uzala, 1975); but Kurosawa always returned to the samurai form for his most profound statements about life and art (Kagemusha [The Shadow Warrior], 1980; Ran, 1985).

Kurosawa Akira

Kurosawa Akira.

PRNewsFoto/Anaheim University/AP Images

Two other established directors who produced their greatest films in the postwar period were Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujirō. Both had begun their careers in the silent era and were more traditionally Japanese in style and content than Kurosawa. Mizoguchi’s films, whether period (Sansho dayu [Sansho the Bailiff], 1954) or contemporary (Yoru no onnatachi [Women of the Night], 1948), were frequently critiques of feudalism that focused on the condition of women within the social order. His greatest postwar films were Saikaku ichidai onna (1952; The Life of Oharu), the biography of a 17th-century courtesan, and Ugetsu (1953), the story of two men who abandon their wives for fame and glory during the 16th-century civil wars. Both were masterworks that clearly demonstrated Mizoguchi’s expressive use of luminous decor, extended long takes, and deep-focus composition. As one of the great mise-en-scène directors, Mizoguchi can be compared to Murnau, Ophüls, and Welles, but his transcendental visual style makes him unique in the history of cinema.

Ozu Yasujirō too was a stylist, but the majority of his 54 films were shomin-geki, a variety of gendai film dealing with the lives of lower-middle-class families (Tokyo monogatari [Tokyo Story], 1953; Higanbana [Equinox Flower], 1958; Ukigusa [Floating Weeds], 1959). They were all very much alike and, in a sense, were all part of a single large film whose subject was the ordinary lives of ordinary people and the sacred beauty therein. Ozu’s minimalist style—originating in both Zen Buddhist aesthetics and the fact that most of his films were shot within the confines of a typical Japanese house—was based on his use of low-angle long takes in which the camera is positioned about three feet (one metre) off the floor at the eye level of a person seated on a tatami mat. This practice led Ozu to an especially imaginative use of offscreen space and “empty scenes.”

Tōkyō monogatari (Tokyo Story)

Scene from Tōkyō monogatari (1953; Tokyo Story), directed by Ozu Yasujirō.

The second postwar generation of Japanese filmmakers was mainly composed of Kobayashi Masaki, Ichikawa Kon, and Shindo Kaneto. Kobayashi is best known for Ningen no joken (1959–61; The Human Condition), his three-part antiwar epic set during Japan’s brutal occupation of Manchuria, and the beautiful ghost film Kwaidan (1964). Ichikawa’s major works were the pacifist films Biruma no tategoto (1956; The Burmese Harp) and Nobi (1959; Fires on the Plain). Shindo is best known for his poetic semidocumentary Hadaka no shima (1960; The Island) and the bizarre, folkloristic Onibaba (1964).

The third generation of postwar directors was most active during the 1960s and ’70s. The group was deeply influenced by the French New Wave and included Teshigahara Hiroshi (Suna no onna [Woman in the Dunes], 1964), Masumura Yasuzo (Akai Tenshi [The Red Angel], 1965), Imamura Shohei (Jinruigako nyumon [The Pornographers], 1966), and Oshima Nagisa (Ai no corrida [In the Realm of the Senses], 1976). In the mid-1960s, however, competition from multiple-channel colour television and from American distributors forced the Japanese film industry into economic decline. A decade later, two major studios were bankrupt, and film production was increasingly dominated by two domestic exploitation genres: the yakuza-eiga, or contemporary urban gangster film, and the semipornographic eroducti on film, which mixed sex and sadism. During the 1980s and ’90s, Japan continued to produce the highest annual volume of films of any country in the world, but the studios remained in decline, and most serious productions, such as Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, were funded by foreign interests. At the turn of the 21st century, funding for films remained low, although the market for films was the greatest ever. This situation led to the mass production of low-budget films, as well as to the increased popularity of amateur and experimental films.

China, Taiwan, and Korea

Other Asian nations have had spotty cinematic histories, although most developed strong traditions during the late 20th century. The film industries of China, Taiwan, and Korea were marked by government restrictions for most of the 20th century, and the majority of their output consisted of propaganda films. The loosening of many restrictions in the 1980s and ’90s resulted in a new wave of Asian directors who attained worldwide prominence. At the turn of the 21st century, China’s “Fifth Generation Cinema” was known for such outstanding young directors as Zhang Yimou, who specialized in tales of political oppression and sexual repression. Korea’s cinematic history is difficult to assess, because virtually no films made prior to World War II exist, but works produced during the 1950s and ’60s—the “golden age” of Korean cinema—gained a strong international reputation. The most successful Taiwanese directors of the late 20th century were Ang Lee, who directed films ranging from American morality tales such as The Ice Storm (1997) to the lavish martial-arts fantasy Wo hu zang long (2000; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon); and Hou Hsiao-hsien, who was best known for his sensitive family dramas (Hao nan hao nu [Good Men, Good Women], 1995).

Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Zhang Ziyi (left) and Chang Chen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

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NAKARAJAN

Saturday, 30 January 2021

HOLLYWOOD HISTORY AND WORLD CINEMA FROM 1910 ONWARDS

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