history of the motion picture - The silent years, 1910-27 | Britannica.com
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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 Louis Mercanton’s three-and-one-half-reel La Reine Elisabeth ( 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.
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 motion pictures their characteristic modern form.
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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, Mo., 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.
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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.
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Various companies experimented with location shooting in Jacksonville, Fla., in San Antonio , Texas, in Santa Fe , N.M., 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.
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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, Calif., 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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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, G.W. (“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, Calif. 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 (Dec. 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.
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 black 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 bc, 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.)
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, N.Y., 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.
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 Dec. 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.
Still from Robert Wiene’s classic Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. …
From a private collection
Peter Lorre in M (1931), directed by Fritz Lang.
© Paramount Pictures Corporation; photograph, the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City
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 Man”; English title: 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 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.
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 F. 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 Ilich 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 Sergey Eisenstein and Vsevolod Illarionovich 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.
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.
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.
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 “The Odessa Steps” sequence in the film Battleship …
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 Illarionovich 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.
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.
Post-World War I American cinema
During the 1920s in the United States , motion-picture production, distribution, and exhibition became a major national industry and movies perhaps the major national obsession . The salaries of stars reached monumental proportions; filmmaking practices and narrative formulas were standardized to accommodate mass production; and Wall Street began to invest heavily in every branch of the business. The growing industry was organized according to the studio system that, in many respects, the producer Thomas Harper Ince had developed between 1914 and 1918 at Inceville, his studio in the Santa Ynez Canyon near Hollywood. Ince functioned as the central authority over multiple production units, each headed by a director who was required to shoot an assigned film according to a detailed continuity script. Every project was carefully budgeted and tightly scheduled, and Ince himself supervised the final cut. This central producer system was the prototype for the studio system of the 1920s, and, with some modification, it prevailed as the dominant mode of Hollywood production for the next 40 years.
Virtually all the major film genres evolved and were codified during the 1920s, but none was more characteristic of the period than the slapstick comedy. This form was originated by Mack Sennett , who, at his Keystone Studios, produced countless one- and two-reel shorts and features (Tillie’s Punctured Romance, 1914; The Surf Girl, 1916; Teddy at the Throttle, 1917) whose narrative logic was subordinated to fantastic, purely visual humour. An anarchic mixture of circus, vaudeville, burlesque, pantomime, and the chase, Sennett’s Keystone comedies created a world of inspired madness and mayhem , and they employed the talents of such future stars as Charlie Chaplin , Harry Langdon , Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle , Mabel Normand , and Harold Lloyd . When these performers achieved fame, many of them left Keystone, often to form their own production companies, a practice still possible in the early 1920s.
Chaplin, for example, who had developed the persona of the “Little Tramp” at Keystone, went on to direct and star in a series of shorts produced by Essanay in 1915 (The Tramp, A Night in the Show) and Mutual between 1916 and 1917 (The Vagabond, One A.M., The Rink, Easy Street). In 1917 he was offered an eight-film contract with First National that enabled him to establish his own studio. He directed his first feature there, the semiautobiographical The Kid (1921), but most of his First National films were two-reelers. In 1919 Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford , and Douglas Fairbanks , the four most popular and powerful film artists of the time, jointly formed the United Artists Corporation in order to produce and distribute—and thereby retain artistic and financial control over—their own films. Chaplin directed three silent features for United Artists: A Woman of Paris (1923), his great comic epic The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus (1928), which was released after the introduction of sound into motion pictures. He later made several sound films, but the two most successful—his first two, City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936)—were essentially silent films with musical scores.
Charlie Chaplin (left) and Harry Myers (centre) in City Lights (1931), …
© 1931 United Artists Corporation; photograph from a private collection
Buster Keaton possessed a kind of comic talent very different from Chaplin’s, but both men were wonderfully subtle actors with a keen sense of the tragic often contained within the comic, and both were major directors of their period. Keaton, like Chaplin, was born into a theatrical family and began performing in vaudeville skits at a young age. Intrigued by the new film medium, he left the stage and worked for two years as a supporting comedian for Arbuckle’s production company. In 1919 Keaton formed his own production company, where over the next four years he made 20 shorts (including One Week, 1920; The Boat, 1921; Cops, 1922; and The Balloonatic, 1923) that represent, with Chaplin’s Mutual films, the acme of American slapstick comedy. A Keaton trademark was the “trajectory gag,” in which perfect timing of acting, directing, and editing propels his film character through a geometric progression of complicated sight gags that seem impossibly dangerous but are still dramatically logical. Such routines inform all of Keaton’s major features—Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), and his masterpieces The General (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). Keaton’s greatest films, all made before his company was absorbed by MGM, have a reflexive quality that indicates his fascination with film as a medium. Although some of his MGM films were financially successful, the factory-like studio system stifled Keaton’s creativity, and he was reduced to playing bit parts after the early 1930s.
Buster Keaton in Go West (1925).
The Kobal Collection
Important but lesser silent comics were Lloyd , the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy , Langdon, and Arbuckle. Working at the Hal Roach Studios, Lloyd cultivated the persona of an earnest, sweet-tempered boy-next-door. He specialized in a variant of Keystone mayhem known as the “comedy of thrills,” in which—as in Lloyd’s most famous features, Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925)—an innocent protagonist finds himself placed in physical danger. Laurel and Hardy also worked for Roach. They made 27 silent two-reelers, including Putting Pants on Philip (1927) and Liberty (1929), and became even more popular in the 1930s in such sound films as Another Fine Mess (1930) and Sons of the Desert (1933). Their comic characters were basically grown-up children whose relationship was sometimes disturbingly sadomasochistic. Langdon also traded on a childlike, even babylike, image in such popular features as The Strong Man (1926) and Long Pants (1927), both directed by Frank Capra. Arbuckle , however, in his few years of stardom, created the character of a leering, sensual adult. Arbuckle’s talent was limited, but his persona affected the course of American film history in a quite unexpected way.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in Way Out West (1937).
John Kobal Foundation/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Arbuckle was at the centre of the most damaging scandal to affect American motion pictures during the silent era. In September 1921 the comedian and several friends hosted a weekend party in a San Francisco hotel. During the party a woman became ill, and she later died in a hospital of peritonitis. Press reports of the event as a drunken orgy inflamed public opinion. Amid the volatile social transformations of the post-World War I era, with issues such as immigration restriction and the national prohibition of alcoholic beverages deeply dividing the country, many had come to regard motion pictures as a disturbing instigator of social change and its high-living stars as threats to moral order and values. The Arbuckle scandal seemed to encapsulate these fears, and prosecutors responded by accusing the actor of rape and murder. Eventually indicted for manslaughter, he was tried three times; the first two trials ended in hung juries, and in the third the jury deliberated for six minutes and voted for acquittal. But Arbuckle’s career as an actor was in ruins, and he was banned from the screen for more than a decade. Other sensational deaths involving Hollywood personalities, through murder or suicide or drug overdose, fueled the public furor.
To stave off increasing efforts by state and local governments to censor motion pictures, the Hollywood studios formed a new, stronger trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA; later renamed the Motion Picture Association of America ). They also hired a conservative politician, U.S. Postmaster General Will H. Hays , as its head. The Hays Office, as the association became popularly known, advocated industry self-regulation as an alternative to governmental interference, and it succeeded in preventing the expansion of censorship efforts. Hays promulgated a series of documents that attempted to regulate various forms of criminal and immoral behaviour depicted in motion pictures. A principle such as “compensating values,” for example, recognized that popular entertainment had always told stories of lawbreaking and social transgression, but it held that law and morality should always triumph in a film.
The leading practitioner of the compensating values formula was the flamboyant director Cecil B. DeMille . He first became famous after World War I for a series of sophisticated comedies of manners that were aimed at Hollywood’s new middle-class audience (Old Wives for New, 1918; Forbidden Fruit, 1921). When the Hays Office was established, DeMille turned to the sex- and violence-drenched religious spectacles that made him an international figure, notably The Ten Commandments (1923; remade 1956). DeMille’s chief rival in the production of stylish sex comedies was the German émigré Ernst Lubitsch . An early master of the UFA Kostümfilm, Lubitsch excelled at sexual innuendo and understatement in such urbane essays as The Marriage Circle (1924). Also popular during the 1920s were the swashbuckling exploits of Douglas Fairbanks , whose lavish adventure spectacles, including Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), thrilled a generation, and the narrative documentaries of Robert Flaherty , whose Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926) were unexpectedly successful with the public and with critics.
The most enigmatic and unconventional figure working in Hollywood at the time, however, was without a doubt the Viennese émigré Erich von Stroheim . Stroheim, who also acted, learned directing as an assistant to Griffith on Intolerance and Hearts of the World. His first three films—Blind Husbands (1918), The Devil’s Passkey (1919), and Foolish Wives (1922)—constitute an obsessive trilogy of adultery; each features a sexual triangle in which an American wife is seduced by a Prussian army officer. Even though all three films were enormously popular, the great sums Stroheim was spending on the extravagant production design and costuming of his next project brought him into conflict with his Universal producers, and he was replaced.
Stroheim then signed a contract with Goldwyn Pictures and began work on a long-cherished project—an adaptation of Frank Norris ’s grim naturalistic novel McTeague . Shot entirely on location in the streets and rooming houses of San Francisco, in Death Valley , and in the California hills, the film was conceived as a sentence-by-sentence translation of its source. Stroheim’s original version ran approximately 10 hours. Realizing that the film was too long to be exhibited, he cut almost half the footage. The film was still deemed too long, so Stroheim, with the help of director Rex Ingram, edited it down into a four-hour version that could be shown in two parts. By that time, however, Goldwyn Pictures had merged with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to become MGM. MGM took the negative from Stroheim and cut another two hours, destroying the excised footage in the process. Released as Greed (1924), the film had enormous gaps in continuity, but it was still recognized as a work of genius in its rich psychological characterization and in its creation of a naturalistic analogue for the novel.
(From left) Zasu Pitts, Gibson Gowland, and Hughie Mack in the silent film …
From a private collection
Stroheim made one more film for MGM, a darkly satiric adaptation of the Franz Lehár operetta The Merry Widow (1925). He then went to Celebrity Pictures, where he directed The Wedding March (1928), a two-part spectacle set in imperial Vienna, but his work was taken from him and recut into a single film when Celebrity was absorbed by Paramount. Stroheim’s last directorial duties were on the botched Queen Kelly (1929) and Walking down Broadway (1932), although he was removed from both films for various reasons. He made his living thereafter by writing screenplays and acting.
Although many of Stroheim’s troubles with Hollywood were personal, he was also a casualty of the American film industry’s transformation during the 1920s from a speculative entrepreneurial enterprise into a vertically and horizontally integrated oligopoly that had no tolerance for creative difference. His situation was not unique; many singular artists, including Griffith, Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton, found it difficult to survive as filmmakers under the rigidly standardized studio system that had been established by the end of the decade. The industry’s conversion to sound at that time reinforced its big-business tendencies and further discouraged independent filmmakers. The studios, which had borrowed huge sums of money on the very brink of the Great Depression in order to finance the conversion, were determined to reduce production costs and increase efficiency. They therefore became less and less willing to tolerate artistic innovation or eccentricity.