Write a 550- to 750-word paper that examines global historical changes in film. As part of your examination, select one of the following alternative movements to American cinema:

German Expressionism
French Impressionism and Surrealism
Soviet Montage
Italian Neorealism
The French New Wave
Hong Kong Cinema

Discuss how the alternative cinema was affected by photography, film, form, style, special effects, and fictional narrative historically.

Describe how your selected alternative movement affected the film industry. Be sure to discuss how it differed from American cinema during the same period.

Refer to the textbook and this assignment requires outside research.

APA Style and Formatting is required: Include citations throughout your paper with corresponding references on the reference page.

CHAPTER 12 Historical Changes in Film Art: Conventions and Choices, Tradition and Trends

hroughout this book, we’ve urged you to think like a filmmaker. We believe that it’s a good way to enhance your appreciation of how films work. We’ve tried to aid that appreciation by setting out the range of options filmmakers face when they shape their film’s overall form (Chapters 1–3), when they employ techniques of the medium (Chapters 4–8), and when they position the film within genres or

other categories (Chapters 9–10). The book has surveyed a very big menu of artistic choices. As we’ve also suggested, filmmakers are obliged to make creative decisions at every stage of the process. But actually all the options

we’ve scanned aren’t available to any one filmmaker at any particular period. In different times and places, filmmakers have had narrower menus of options.

We can understand the art of film better if we’re aware of those options, of the constraints and opportunities available to earlier film creators. Just as important, when we understand the choices the filmmakers could make, we can have richer experiences of the films. For instance, it wouldn’t be reasonable to say that because Buster Keaton couldn’t make Our Hospitality with sound we couldn’t enjoy the movie. Once we notice how Keaton uses deep space, theme-and-variations gags, and other resources of visual storytelling, the film offers us a delightful experience (pp. 154–158). Similarly, some people won’t watch black-and-white films, but if we understand that most filmmakers before the 1960s could not afford the costs of color filming, we’re in a good position to notice how this constraint could be exploited to make lighting, set design, and costumes vivid in black and white.

In this chapter we consider some options and opportunities available to filmmakers at certain points in history. Sometimes the options seem limited, but surprisingly, they can also nourish creative moviemaking. If you willingly cut down your choices, you can concentrate on working within them. For example, if you’ve embraced intensified continuity (pp. 246–250) as your editing paradigm, you will still face all manner of choices, but they’re more focused and specific.

At the same time, limits can be challenges, provoking filmmakers to seek alternatives. Again and again we’ll see that filmmakers who found the classical Hollywood model too confining have sought other, equally effective ways to make

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453 movies. But even when filmmakers refuse tradition, that tradition has shaped their creative thinking. And often rebellion against one tradition will draw upon other traditions. We’ll see, for instance, that young Soviet filmmakers, refusing the meticulously staged melodramas of the older generation, drew inspiration from the emerging tradition of Hollywood. Studying film history reminds us that, one way or another, filmmakers are always indebted to other filmmakers—their contemporaries, or those who have come before.

CREATIVE DECISIONS

Film Form and Style across History Why do older movies feel different from those we see today? It’s not that their makers were less smart or sophisticated than we are. We can appreciate films from earlier times better if we think in terms we’ve discussed throughout this book.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to understanding older films is the fact that they operate according to different conventions. Across most of film history, for instance, censorship blocked filmmakers from directly presenting intimate sexual situations. That forced screenwriters and directors to hint that two people were erotically attracted or were having an affair. By contrast, many of today’s movies present nudity, intercourse, and other sexual displays. That convention of our time doesn’t make our films better, just different—although some historians will argue when filmmakers were forced to be indirect, their films became more slyly unpredictable than ours are (12.1).

Because audiences of earlier times knew the conventions, they came in with different expectations than we do today. For instance, an audience for silent films expected the acting to be visually expressive. That doesn’t mean that silent-film acting was broad or overdone; in fact, we find plenty of subtle performances in the period. (See p. 134.) It’s just that viewers of the 1910s and 1920s expected actors to use their whole bodies to communicate emotion pictorially. Our actors are more likely to rely on their facial expressions and line readings.

Most basically, filmmakers of earlier eras had different formal and stylistic options to choose from. Since we’re used to thinking that we enjoy a wider range of creative choices than they did, their films might seem limited.

There were certainly technological constraints. Before 1930 or so, most directors couldn’t make a film with sound, and before 1960 or thereabouts, most producers couldn’t afford to make a film in color. Zoom lenses weren’t practical until the 1950s, and digital effects had to wait for faster chips, bigger storage space, and more sophisticated programs.

Less obviously, some storytelling options just weren’t thinkable at certain points. Today we routinely see complicated flashback plots in such ordinary movies as The Hangover, but we seldom see them in films of the silent era. The discontinuity editing Eisenstein exploited in October (1927) wasn’t on the menu five years earlier. Nobody thought of it. Likewise, filmmakers could have employed slow motion in fiction features in the 1930s and 1940s, but it was almost unknown. Today it’s common.

Do all these factors mean that formal and stylistic options have expanded? Does today’s filmmaker have a greater range of choice than in earlier times? To some extent, yes; innovations have accumulated, providing the filmmaker a big toolkit. But some older options aren’t live ones for every filmmaker.

12.1 Images say what dialogue can’t. Shadows prophesy the outcome of a flirtation in Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932).

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12.2

12.3

12.2–12.3 Widescreen staging. The anamorphic 2.55 ratio widescreen of early CinemaScope (p. 182) encouraged filmmakers to use broad, distant staging in long takes, as in The Robe (1953; 12.2). Director Henry Koster uses several characters’ eyelines to call attention to Marcellus, the figure on the near left. This stylistic choice is rare in contemporary Hollywood. Yet some recent filmmakers in other countries have found distant staging a fruitful technique. In Dust in the Wind (1986; 12.3) Hou Hsiao-hsien also uses characters’ eyelines to direct our attention to the significant action, the father on his deathbed. In addition, Hou’s set blocks off the right portion of the frame and minimizes other characters through shadow and aspects of setting. A chair conceals the face of the kneeling daughter, so that her face won’t distract us from the father.

For example, directors working with the CinemaScope widescreen process in the early 1950s felt obliged to stage the action fairly far from the camera and to spread the action out across the frame (12.2). Fairly soon, improvements in lenses and other equipment enabled them to use more medium shots and close-ups. By the mid-1960s, broad and distant staging became rare, and today a Hollywood filmmaker who decided to revisit that approach would risk looking old-fashioned. The contemporary approach is to frame actors tightly, even in widescreen formats (1.52, 6.119–6.134). Yet this distant, lateral staging was by no means a dead end creatively. Directors in other countries have refined techniques that are similar to what we see in early ’Scope films (12.3).

Or go back to the example of a telephone conversation (p. 263). Suppose you want to show both Jim and Amanda as they talk. Today most directors would simply cut from one to the other. In the 1910s, however, there was another option: a split screen (12.4). It was striking but a bit complicated to shoot, so it was eventually dropped in favor of cutting. But during the 1960s it was occasionally revived for

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12.4

12.5

12.6

12.4–12.6 Techniques revived. Split-screen presentation of phone conversations was not unusual in the period of Suspense (1913; 12.4). For decades afterward it was almost never used, but it was revived in the 1960s occasionally for suspense or comedy, as in the musical Bye Bye Birdie (1963; 12.5). It was also a handy way to fill up the wide screen. The 2003 retro comedy Down with Love refers back to the 1960s convention (12.6).

comedies (12.5). Today a director might call on it for comic effect, or to hark back to its 1960s usage (12.6).

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The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin summed up this situation in a famous line: “Not everything is possible at all times.” At any moment in film history, there are forces—technology, budget, political censorship, prevailing tastes, clashes within the production team—working to limit artistic choices. The limits on today’s filmmakers aren’t as visible to us, but they are there. In watching an older film, we should try to understand the options that filmmakers had to work with at the time. That will sensitize us not only to the range of possibilities but also to the ways in which some filmmakers, in a quest to try something different, came up with innovations that later creators could use.

Traditions and Movements in Film History We’ve presented artistic decision making in film as a matter of individual choice. That’s accurate, up to a point. But most filmmakers work in groups, as we saw back in Chapter 1. Members of the group contribute to decisions about the project. Moreover, the team members have learned their craft from other filmmakers. The community that shapes a filmmaker’s choice includes many who have gone before, who have laid down best practices and solid solutions to recurring problems.

In other words, filmmakers belong to traditions. They pass ideas about moviemaking from peer to peer, from expert to novice. And many of those ideas are suggestions about what choices you should make. Screenwriters learn to write using three-act structure; cinematographers learn favored ways of lighting faces;

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Some modern filmmakers have tried to imitate older films’ look and feel. Does it work? On The Good German, see “Not back to the future, but ahead to the past.” On Casino Royale, see “Can they make ’em like they used to? Continued.”

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“What’s left to discover today? Plenty” considers the ways that our knowledge of filmmaking traditions changes as forgotten films come to light.

actors learn what counts as a good performance. A tradition, in effect, favors certain creative choices over others. One of the best examples of a filmmaking tradition is American studio cinema, so at various points in the chapter we’ll examine how that

tradition emerged and changed. In many respects, the Hollywood tradition influenced filmmaking around the world. A more limited tradition is that of Hong Kong action cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. That too, as we’ll see, proved quite influential.

Traditions nudge a filmmaker toward certain choices and away from others. But sometimes filmmakers want to explore those others. In instances like these, we get the shorter-lived trends we call movements. In a movement, filmmakers typically operate within a common production structure and share certain assumptions about filmmaking. Above all, they favor a common approach to form, style, and theme that sets them somewhat apart from the usual practices. They innovate. Movements, then, are untraditional in some ways. They press filmmakers to make unusual formal and stylistic choices.

Sometimes the filmmakers in a movement know one another well and respond to one another’s projects. This situation occurred with the Soviet Montage filmmakers of the 1920s, the Surrealists of the period, and the French New Wave of the 1950s–1960s. Here we find young people cooperating and competing because they wanted to explore some new ideas about what cinema could be. To clarify those ideas, they often wrote books and articles. Other movements are more diffuse, with unconnected filmmakers gravitating toward a common approach to form and style.

Most movements don’t last more than a few years, but they can exercise a far-reaching effect. Some movements of the silent and early sound era have affected filmmaking for decades afterward. As we’ll see, many movements have been selectively absorbed into broader traditions, particularly Hollywood’s. The films of our time reenact creative decisions made by filmmakers in the past.

You should already have a sense of this process, because our examples from both recent films and older ones show that today’s films often accept or rework choices that were made in much earlier work. In several sections that follow, we mention how some contemporary filmmakers have found inspiration in the choices favored by film movements.

Because we’re exploring historical contexts, we’ll go beyond noting stylistic and formal qualities. For each tradition and movement, we’ll point to relevant factors that affect the filmmakers’ options—factors such as the state of the industry, artistic theories held by the filmmakers themselves, technological features, and cultural and economic forces. These factors help explain how a particular trend began and developed. This material will also provide a context for particular films we’ve already discussed. For example, we introduced you to Georges Méliès in Chapter 4 and Louis Lumière in Chapter 5. In the previous chapter, we analyzed a Soviet Montage film (Man with a Movie Camera) and a French New Wave one (Breathless). Now you have a chance to see this work in a broader context.

In the sections that follow, we haven’t tried to characterize other important traditions, such as that of Japanese cinema, or other movements, such as Brazil’s Cinema Nôvo of the early 1960s. Readers interested in knowing more can consult our Film History: An Introduction. Here we simply trace how certain possibilities of film form and style were explored in a few typical and well-known historical traditions and movements. The first section sets the stage for them by examining the origins of cinema itself.

Early Cinema (1893–1903) In Chapter 1, we saw that film is a technology-driven medium. To create the illusion of movement, still pictures must appear in rapid succession. To prepare those images and display them at the right rate, certain technologies are necessary.

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457

Photography and Cinema Most basically, there must be a way of recording a long series of images on some sort of support. In principle, one could simply draw a string of images on a strip of paper or a disc. But photography offered the cheapest and most efficient way to generate the thousands of images needed for a reasonably lengthy show. Thus the invention of photography in 1826 launched a series of discoveries that made cinema possible.

Early photographs required lengthy exposures (initially hours, later minutes) for a single image; this made photographed motion pictures, which need 12 or more frames per second, impossible. Faster exposures, of about 1/25th of a second, became possible by the 1870s, but only on glass plates. Glass plates weren’t usable for motion pictures since there was no practical way to move them through a camera or projector. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge, an American photographer, did make a series of photographs of a running horse by using a series of cameras with glass plate film and fast exposure, but he was primarily interested in freezing phases of an action, not re-creating the movement by projecting the images in succession.

In 1882, another scientist interested in analyzing animal movement, the Frenchman Étienne-Jules Marey, invented a camera that recorded 12 separate images on the edge of a revolving disc of film on glass. This constituted a step toward the motion picture camera. In 1888, Marey built the first camera to use a strip of flexible film, this time on paper. Again, the purpose was only to break down movement into a series of stills, and the movements photographed lasted a second or less. In 1889, George Eastman introduced a crude flexible film base, celluloid. After this base was improved and camera mechanisms had been devised to draw the film past the lens and expose it to light, the creation of long strips of frames became possible.

Projectors had existed for many years and had been used to show slides and shadow entertainments. These magic lanterns were modified by the addition of shutters, cranks, and other devices to become early motion picture projectors.

One final device was needed if films were to be projected. Since the film stops briefly while the light shines through each individual frame, there had to be a mechanism to create an intermittent motion of the film. Marey used a Maltese cross gear on his 1888 camera, and this became a standard part of early cameras and projectors.

A flexible and transparent film base, a fast exposure time, a mechanism to pull the film through the camera, an intermittent device to stop the film, and a shutter to block off light—all these innovations had been achieved by the early 1890s. After several years, inventors working independently in many countries had developed film cameras and projection devices. The two most important firms were the Edison Manufacturing Company in America, owned by inventor Thomas A. Edison, and Lumière Frères in France, the family firm of Louis and Auguste Lumière.

Edison vs. Lumière By 1893, Thomas A. Edison’s assistant, W. K. L. Dickson, had developed a camera that made short 35mm films. Interested in exploiting these films as a novelty, Edison hoped to combine them with his phonograph to show sound movies. He had Dickson develop a peep-show machine, the Kinetoscope (12.7), to display these films to individual viewers.

But Edison believed that movies were a passing fad, so he didn’t develop a system to project films onto a screen. This task was left to the Lumière brothers. They invented their own camera independently; it exposed a short roll of 35mm film and also served as a projector (12.8). On December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers presented motion pictures on a screen, at the Grand Café in Paris.

There had been several earlier public screenings, but the Lumières found the most practical method for projecting films, and their format largely determined the direction in which the new medium developed. Edison was obliged to follow their example, abandoning the Kinetoscope and creating his own production company to make films for public projection.

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Early cinema was influenced by other media of its day, including narrative painting. We suggest some similarities in “Professor sees more parallels between things, other things.”

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12.7

12.8

12.9

12.7–12.9 Alternative approaches to early filmmaking. Edison’s Kinetoscope threaded film in a continuous loop around a series of bobbins (12.7). The film was watched by one viewer at a time. The Lumière brothers aimed for public screenings, so they put a magic-lantern projector behind their camera so the images could be displayed to several viewers (12.8). In Edison’s rotating film studio, the Black Maria, a hinged central portion of the roof swung open for filming (12.9).

In conjuring you work under the attentive gaze of the public, who never fail to spot a suspicious movement. You are alone, their eyes never leave you. Failure would not be tolerated. . . . While in the cinema . . . you can do your confecting quietly, far from those profane gazes, and you can do things thirty-six times if necessary until they are right. This allows you to travel further in the domain of the marvellous.” —George Méliès, magician and filmmaker

Early Form and Style The first films typically consisted of a single shot framing an action, usually at long-shot distance. In the first film studio, Edison’s Black Maria (12.9), vaudeville entertainers, famous sports figures, and celebrities such as Annie Oakley performed for the camera. A hinged portion of the roof opened to admit a patch of sunlight, and the entire building turned on a circular rail (visible in 12.9) to follow the sun’s motion. The Lumières, however, took their cameras out to parks, gardens, beaches, and other public places to film everyday activities or news events, as in their Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (5.64).

Until about 1903, most films showed scenic places or noteworthy events, so these can be considered early documentaries. The Lumières sent camera operators all over the world to photograph important events and exotic locales.

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459 Staged narratives, brief skits or gags, were also popular. Edison’s staff played out comic scenes, such as one copyrighted 1893 in which a drunken man struggles briefly with a policeman. The Lumières made a popular short, L’Arroseur arrosé (The Waterer Watered, 1895), also a comic scene, in which a boy tricks a gardener into squirting himself with a hose (4.8).

The earliest films may look crude to us today. This is partly because we seldom see good copies. In properly preserved prints, shown at the right projection speed, the films have a photographic richness that has seldom been equaled. But because they were so short—before 1905, running only a few minutes—the first films couldn’t develop complex stories or rhetorical arguments. Relying on unusual events, cute animals, and other brief attractions, they look forward to the amateur videos that show up on YouTube today (12.10). Early films have inspired avant-garde filmmakers to explore movement and abstract photographic qualities (12.11).

12.10

12.11

12.10–12.11 Early film and later interests. A Lumière film from 1900, La petite fille et son chat (The Little Girl and Her Cat), centers on a perennial attraction of today’s online videos (12.10). In Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969), avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs uses an optical printer to dissect and stylize a 1905 film of the same name, creating what Jacobs calls “a dream within a dream” (12.11).

Méliès, Magic, and Fictional Narrative In 1896, Georges Méliès built his own camera, based on a projector he had bought. His first films resembled the Lumières’ shots of everyday activities. But as we have seen (pp. 113–114), Méliès was a stage magician, and he discovered the possibilities of special effects. In 1897, Méliès built his own studio, filled with flats and trapdoors. These allowed him to control his effects very precisely (12.12).

Méliès built elaborate settings to create fantasy worlds within which his magical transformations could occur. As we’ve already seen, this care in manipulating setting, lighting, costume, and staging made Méliès the first master of mise-en-scene (4.3–4.6). He was also an important innovator in editing. For one thing, he found that he could create magical transformations by stopping the camera, adjusting elements in the scene, and then resuming filming. Inspecting the original material, historians have found that Méliès trimmed a few frames at each special effect. Stopping and restarting the camera created light bursts on the first few frames, and these had to be snipped out.

Méliès progressed to longer narratives, with each scene played out in a single camera position, and he used cuts to link them. The most famous of these was A Trip to the Moon (1902). Méliès’s Star Film company was associated with magic tricks and fairy stories, but it turned out an astonishing variety of films, including scenes from the Bible and a series based on the Dreyfus case. The dazzling special effects, the impressive settings and costumes, and the expansive fantasies and historical narratives made Méliès’s films popular and widely imitated. They still exercise a powerful hold, having been painstakingly collected and restored, released on DVD, and given a central role in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), which pays homage to Méliès by restaging some of the films.

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The work of Lumière, Méliès, and other early filmmakers gained worldwide fame because films circulated freely from country to country. The French phonograph company Pathé Frères moved into filmmaking in 1901, establishing production and distribution branches in many countries. Until 1914, Pathé was the largest film concern in the world. In England, several entrepreneurs managed to invent or obtain equipment and made scenics, narratives, and trick films from 1895 into the early years of the 20th century. Members of the Brighton School (primarily G. Albert Smith and James Williamson), as well as others such as Cecil Hepworth, shot their films on location or in simple open-air studios (as in 12.13). Their innovative films circulated abroad and influenced other filmmakers. Pioneers in other countries invented or bought equipment and were soon making their own films of everyday scenes or fantasy transformations.

As films became longer, narrative form became the most prominent type of filmmaking in the commercial industry, and the popularity of cinema continued to grow. French, Italian, and American films ruled world markets. Later, World War I was to restrict the international flow of films, and Hollywood emerged as

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In the first years, filmmaking sprang up in small towns all across America. The films are still being rediscovered, as we found in “You can go home again, and maybe find an old movie.”

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12.12

12.13

12.12–12.13 Early studio shooting. Unlike Edison’s Black Maria, Méliès’s studio was glass-sided, like a greenhouse, and admitted sunlight from many directions (12.12). G. Albert Smith’s Santa Claus (1898) was filmed in the open air, with a false backdrop (12.13). It displays typical traits of the first fictional narratives: distant camera position, flat lighting, and a rear wall placed perpendicular to the camera lens.

the dominant industrial force in film production. In some countries, filmmakers responded by creating movements that differed sharply from the look and feel of the American product.

The Development of the Classical Hollywood Cinema (1908–1927) Edison, determined to make money from his invention, brought patent-violation suits against competing moviemaking firms. When he failed to stamp out his rivals, he allied with several of them in 1908 to establish the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). Edison and the American Mutoscope and Biograph company were the only stockholders and patent owners. They licensed other members to make, distribute, and exhibit films, and they standardized film lengths at one reel (running about 15 minutes). But this move didn’t eliminate the other production companies, who sprang up quickly. In 1912 the U.S. government sued the MPPC, and three years later it was declared a monopoly and forced to break up.

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Hollywood and the Studio System of Production At the same period, both MPPC companies and independents began to relocate from New York and Chicago to California. Los Angeles offered a climate that permitted shooting year-round, and a great variety of locations—mountains, ocean, desert, city. Soon Hollywood and other small towns on the outskirts of Los Angeles hosted film production.

Through the 1910s and 1920s, the smaller firms merged to form the large film corporations that still exist today. Famous Players joined with Jesse L. Lasky and then formed a distribution wing, Paramount. By the late 1920s, most of the major companies—MGM (a merger of Metro, Goldwyn, and Mayer), Fox Film Corporation (merged with 20th Century in 1935), Warner Bros., Universal, and Paramount—had been created. Though in competition with one another, the companies cooperated to some degree, because they realized that the demand for films was so great that no one firm could satisfy the market.

By the early 1920s, the American industry had created a structure that would continue for decades. A few large firms with individual artists under contract were supplemented by small independent producing companies. Within a company,

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For an international survey of the important year 1913, see “Lucky ’13,” and for a look at alternatives to continuity editing, see “Looking different today?” We examine the work of two early French masters in “Capellani trionfante” and “How to watch Fantômas, and why.”

; The cinema knows so well how to tell a story that perhaps there is an impression that it has always known how.” —André Gaudreault, film historian

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461 filmmaking tasks were carefully divided among specialists, and each project was overseen by a producer, who kept an eye on budget and schedule. Thomas Ince, a major producer, pioneered the use of detailed shooting scripts and time sheets so that the shooting could be cost- efficient. The stages of production we surveyed in Chapter 1 (pp. 17–29) were systematized by the Hollywood companies of the late 1910s. This business model came to be known as the studio system. Aiming to turn out films in large quantities, the American cinema became oriented toward narrative form.

Narrative Continuity: Early Prototypes One of Edison’s directors, Edwin S. Porter, made some of the first films to use narrative continuity and development. Among these was The Life of an American Fireman (1903), which showed the race of the firefighters to rescue a mother and a child from a burning house. Although this film used several striking narrative elements (a fireman’s premonition of the disaster, a series of shots of the horse-drawn engine racing to the house), the cutting presents an odd time scheme. We see the rescue of a mother and her child twice, from both inside and outside the house. Porter had not realized the possibility of intercutting the two locales to sustain simultaneous action.

In 1903, Porter made The Great Train Robbery, in some ways a prototype for the classical American film. Here the action develops with a linear time, space, and cause-effect logic. We follow each stage of the robbery (12.14), the pursuit, and the final defeat of the robbers. In 1905, Porter also created a simple parallel narrative in The Kleptomaniac, contrasting the fates of a rich woman and a starving woman who are both caught stealing.

British filmmakers were working along similar lines. Indeed, many historians now believe that Porter derived some of his editing techniques from films such as James Williamson’s Fire! (1901) and G. A. Smith’s Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903). The most famous British film of this era was Lewin Fitzhamon’s 1905 film Rescued by Rover (produced by a major British firm, Cecil Hepworth), which treated a kidnapping in a linear fashion similar to that of The Great Train Robbery. After the kidnapping, we see each stage of Rover’s journey to find the child, his return to fetch the child’s father, and their retracing of the route to the kidnapper’s lair. All the shots make the geography of the action completely intelligible (12.15, 12.16).

In 1908, D. W. Griffith began his directing career. Over the next five years, he would make hundreds of one- and two-reelers (running about 15 and 30 minutes, respectively). These films created relatively complex plots in short spans. Griffith certainly didn’t invent all the devices with which he has been credited, but he did give many techniques strong narrative motivation. For example, a few other filmmakers had used simple last-minute rescues with crosscutting between the rescuers and victims, but Griffith developed and popularized this technique (6.111–6.114). By the time he made The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), Griffith was creating lengthy sequences by cutting among several different locales.

Griffith made another creative choice that was unusual for the early 1910s: He concentrated on subtle changes in facial expression (4.33). To catch such nuances, he set up his camera closer to the action than did many of his contemporaries, framing his actors in medium long shot or medium shot.

Griffith’s films were widely influential. In addition, his dynamic, rapid editing in the final chase scenes of Intolerance was to have a considerable impact on the Soviet Montage style of the 1920s. But he wasn’t alone in refining technique. Supervising production at his company, Thomas Ince demanded tight narratives, with no digressions or loose ends, and his request for detailed shooting scripts favored breaking scenes up into several camera positions. Films made under Ince’s control, such as Civilization (1915), The Italian (1915),

12.14 An early effort at narrative continuity. The robbers in the telegraph office in The Great Train Robbery, preparing to board the train seen through the window. The train portion of the image is an early matte shot.

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12.15

12.16

12.15–12.16 Matching screen direction. In Rescued by Rover, the heroic dog leads his master along a street from the right rear moving toward the left foreground (12.15). The pair is moving from right to left as they reach their destination (12.16).

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A Spanish filmmaking student created a revealing video analyzing a 1912 Griffith Biograph short. We talk about the analysis and link to it in “A variation on a sunbeam.”

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12.17

12.18

12.17–12.18 Narrative coherence. The opening scene of The Cheat introduces the branding motif (12.17). It returns later when the villain brands the heroine as another item of property (12.18). Both use the “Rembrandt lighting” that made De Mille famous.

and the Westerns of William S. Hart (p. 337), helped stabilize the emerging continuity conventions. Cecil B. De Mille, a director who was to have a much longer career than Griffith and Ince, made several feature-length dramas and

comedies. His The Cheat (1915) reflects important changes occurring in the studio style between 1914 and 1917. During that period, the glass- roofed studios using daylight for illumination gave way to studios dependent on artificial lighting. The Cheat used spectacular effects of chiaroscuro, with only one or two bright sources of light and no fill light. According to legend, De Mille justified this effect to nervous exhibitors by calling it “Rembrandt lighting.” This north lighting was to become part of the classical repertoire of lighting techniques.

Like many American films of the teens, The Cheat uses a linear pattern of narrative. The first scene (12.17) quickly establishes the Japanese businessman as a ruthless collector of objects; we see him burning his brand onto a small statue. The initial action motivates a later scene in which the businessman brands the heroine, who has fallen into his power by borrowing money from him (12.18). The Cheat was one of several 1915 films that showed that Hollywood films were moving toward greater complexity in their storytelling.

The 180° system of staging, shooting, and editing (pp. 231–233) was developing as well. Eyeline matches became more common from 1910 on, and the match on action was in common use by 1916. Shot/reverse-shot cutting became widespread as well, as seen in The Cheat (1915), Hart’s Western The Narrow Trail (1917), and Griffith’s A Romance of Happy Valley (1919).

Classical Form and Style in Place By the early 1920s, the continuity system had become a standardized style that directors in the Hollywood studios used to create coherent, gripping storytelling. Screen direction was usually respected. A match on action could provide a cut to a closer view in a scene (12.19, 12.20). A conversation around a table would no longer be handled in a single frontal shot (12.21–12.25). When an awkward match might have resulted from the joining of two shots, the filmmakers could cover it by inserting a dialogue title.

Filmmakers conceived ways to handle large-scale narrative form as well. By 1923, Buster Keaton could construct a perfectly balanced plot for Our Hospitality. As we saw in Chapter 4, the action develops logically from the death of Willie McKay’s father to Willie’s final resolution of the feud. Along the way, motifs like the railroad tracks, water, and pistols are carefully motivated and ingeniously varied.

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On two of the most important filmmakers of the early classical period, see our entries on William S. Hart in “Rio Jim, in discrete fragments,” and Douglas Fairbanks in “His Majesty the American.”

That evening I tried to increase my knowledge of motion-picture technique by going to the movies. I sat with a stop watch and notebook and tried to estimate the number of cuts or scenes in a thousand-foot reel, the length of individual scenes, the distance of the subject from the camera, and various other technical details.” —King Vidor, director, recalling the night before he began directing his first film, c. 1912

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12.20

12.19–12.20 Smooth action matching in the early 1920s. In Fred Niblo’s The Three Musketeers (1921), a long shot of the group (12.19) leads to a cut-in to the central character, played by Douglas Fairbanks (12.20).

12.21

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12.23

12.24

12.25

12.21–12.25 Consistent eyelines around a table. In an establishing shot from Are Parents People? (Malcolm St. Clair, 1925), the daughter sits down at the table (12.21). In the medium shot she looks leftward toward her father (12.22). He responds to her by looking rightward in the reverse shot (12.23). The daughter then turns to look to the right at her mother (12.24). Her mother returns her gaze in reverse shot (12.25).

In only a decade or so, Hollywood cinema had developed into a sophisticated cinematic tradition. As we’ve indicated (p. 230), classical continuity became a kind of universal language of fictional moviemaking that’s still in force today. Yet no sooner had the tradition crystallized

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than alternatives began to appear. Filmmakers in other countries pushed in directions that American cinema had not explored. After examining these alternative movements, in the silent era, we’ll return to consider the classical Hollywood cinema after the coming of sound.

German Expressionism (1919–1926) The worldwide success of American films in the late 1910s and through the 1920s confronted filmmakers abroad with a harsh choice. Should they try to imitate Hollywood? The big budgets of the American studios were hard to match in the aftermath of a war that had devastated the European continent. Or should they try to offer a type of cinema markedly different from the Hollywood standard? Most

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For more on the emergence of Hollywood film style in the late 1910s, see “Happy birthday, classical cinema!” We also have a video lecture, “How Motion Pictures Became the Movies, 1908–1920” that considers this period.

464

12.26 The UFA historical epic. Madame Dubarry: A crowd scene in the Tribunal of the French Revolution.

filmmakers took the first option and adopted American techniques of lighting, staging, and editing. (Principles of story construction took longer to be adopted.) But a few filmmakers sought to be more original, and some of them formed movements that had an enduring effect on world cinema.

In 1914, although some impressive pictures had been made in Germany, the industry’s output was relatively small. The nation’s 2,000 movie theaters were playing mostly French, American, Italian, and Danish films. When the war began, America and France banned German films from their screens immediately, but Germany couldn’t afford to ban French and American films, for then the theaters would have had little to show.

To combat imported competition, as well as to create its own propaganda films, the German government began to support the film industry. In 1916, film imports were banned except from neutral Denmark. Production increased rapidly; from a dozen small companies in 1911, the number grew to 131 by 1918. But government policy encouraged these companies to band together into cartels.

In late 1917, the government, the Deutsche Bank, and large industrial concerns combined several small film firms to create the large company UFA (short for Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft). Backed by these conservative interests, UFA was a move toward control of the German market and, its backers hoped, the postwar international market as well. With this huge financial backing, UFA was able to gather superb technicians and build the best-equipped studios in Europe.

One tactic UFA tried was making big-budget spectacle films that could rival Hollywood’s effort. This proved successful. Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (1919; 12.26), a historical epic of the French Revolution, broke down international opposition to German films. Although the French authorities treated it as propaganda, it proved extremely popular elsewhere and helped reopen the world market for local films. Other Lubitsch historical films were soon exported, and in 1923, he became the first German director to be hired by Hollywood.

A more unusual strategy of differentiation emerged at the same time. Despite UFA’s expansion, some small companies remained independent. Among these was Erich Pommer’s Decla (later Decla-Bioscop). In 1919, the firm undertook to produce an unconventional script by two unknowns, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz. These young writers wanted their story to be told in an unusually stylized way. The three designers assigned to the film—Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Röhrig—suggested that it be done in an Expressionist style. As an avant-garde movement, Expressionism had first been important in painting (starting about 1910) and had been quickly taken up in theater, then in literature and architecture. Pommer consented to try it in the cinema, apparently believing that this might be a selling point in the international market. This belief was vindicated in 1920 when Decla’s low-budget The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) created a sensation in Berlin and then in the United States, France, and other countries.

Thanks to the success of Caligari, UFA, along with smaller companies, invested in Expressionist films because these could compete with Hollywood.

The first film of the movement, Caligari, is a powerful example of the Expressionist style. One of its designers, Warm, claimed, “The film image must become graphic art.” With its extreme stylization, Caligari was like a moving Expressionist painting or woodcut print. In contrast to French Impressionism, which based its style primarily on cinematography and editing, German Expressionism depended heavily on mise- en-scene. Shapes are distorted and exaggerated to suggest emotional states. Actors often wear heavy makeup and move in jerky or slow,

Everything is composition; any image whatsoever could be stopped on the screen and would be a marvellously balanced painting of forms and lights. Also, it is one of the films which leaves in our memories the clearest visions—precise and of a slightly static beauty. But even more than painting, it is animated architecture.” —François Berge, French critic, on Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungen

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465

12.27

12.28

12.29

12.27–12.29 Actors as part of setting. In Robert Wiene’s Genuine, the bedroom is flamboyantly Expressionist. As the heroine leans backwards, she blends in with the curved, spiky shapes behind her (12.27). The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Dr. Caligari totters along a corridor that suggests a madman’s vision of the world (12.28). When the hero arrives at Caligari’s asylum, he steps into the center of a pattern of black-and-white lines that radiate across the floor and up the walls (12.29).

sinuous patterns. Most important, all of the elements of the mise-en-scene interact graphically to create an overall composition. We have already seen an example of this in 4.117, where the character Cesare collapses in a stylized forest, his body and outstretched arms echoing the shapes of the trees’ trunks and branches. Characters do not simply exist within a setting but rather form visual elements that merge with the setting (12.27).

Such a departure from realism demands motivation, which Caligari provides through mental subjectivity. We see the world as the mad hero imagines it to be (12.28). This narrative function of the settings becomes explicit at one point, when the hero enters an asylum in his pursuit of Caligari. As he pauses to look around, the world of the film is literally a projection of the hero’s mind (12.29).

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Later, as Expressionism became an accepted style, filmmakers didn’t motivate the style as the subjective state of mad characters. Instead, genre conventions were invoked. Expressionist design could create stylized imagery for fantasy and horror stories, as with Waxworks (1924) and Nosferatu (1922; see 9.18). The Nibelungen (1923–1924) showed that abstract patterning of costume, sets, and crowds could be applied to historical epics as well.

By the mid-1920s, German films were regarded as among the best in the world. UFA’s rich studio facilities attracted foreign filmmakers, including the young Alfred Hitchcock. During the 1920s, Germany coproduced many films with companies in other countries, thus spreading its stylistic influence abroad. The rampant inflation of the early 1920s actually favored Expressionist filmmaking, partly by making it easy for exporters to sell German films cheaply overseas. Inflation discouraged imports as well, because the tumbling exchange rate of the mark made foreign purchases too expensive.

In 1924, the U.S. Dawes Plan helped to stabilize the German economy, and foreign films came in more frequently, offering a degree of competition unknown in Germany for nearly a decade. Expressionist film budgets, meanwhile, were climbing. The last major films of the movement, F. W. Murnau’s Faust (1926) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927; see 12.30), were costly epics that drove UFA deeper into financial difficulty. Erich Pommer quit and tried his luck briefly in America. Other personnel were lured away to Hollywood as well. Trying to counter the stiffer competition, the Germans began to imitate the American product. The resulting films, though sometimes impressive, diluted the unique qualities of the Expressionist style.

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For many years, incomplete versions of Metropolis circulated. In 2008 nearly all the long-lost footage was finally discovered. We tell the story and assess how the new scenes changed the film in “Metropolis unbound.”

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12.30

12.31

12.30–12.31 Lang sustains Expressionism. Metropolis contained many large, Expressionistic sets, including this garden, with pillars that appear to be made of melting clay (12.30). In M, reflections and a display of knives in a shop window create a semi-abstract composition that mirrors the murderer’s obsession (12.31).

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12.32 Expressionism for horror-comedy. The Afterlife as portrayed by Beetlejuice recalls the contorted décor of Caligari (12.28).

By 1927, Expressionism as a movement had died out. But as Georges Sadoul has pointed out, an expressionist (spelled with a lowercase “e” to distinguish it from the Expressionist movement proper) tradition lingered on in many of the German films of the late 1920s and even into such 1930s films as Fritz Lang’s M (1930; see 12.31) and Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932). Some set designers came to the United States and applied techniques there. Hollywood horror and crime films sometimes displayed expressionist tendencies in their settings and lighting. Although the movement lasted only about seven years, expressionism has never entirely died out as one approach to film style, and even today directors may refer to the original German version of it (12.32).

French Impressionism and Surrealism (1918–1930) During the silent era, a number of film movements in France posed major alternatives to the emerging Hollywood tradition. Some of these alternatives, such as abstract cinema and Dada filmmaking, weren’t specifically French and constituted instead a part of the growing international avant-garde. But two alternatives to the American mode remained quite localized.

Impressionism was an avant-garde style that operated largely within the film industry. Most of the Impressionist filmmakers started out working for major French companies, and some of their avant-garde works proved financially successful. In the mid-1920s, most formed their own independent companies but remained within the mainstream commercial industry by renting studio facilities and releasing their films through established firms. The other alternative movement, Surrealism, lay largely outside the film industry. Allied with the Surrealist movement in other arts,

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We discuss some major Impressionist films on DVD in “Albatros soars.”

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467 these filmmakers relied on their own means and private patronage. France in the 1920s offers a striking instance of how different film movements may flourish in the same time and place.

Impressionism World War I struck a serious blow to the French film industry. Personnel were conscripted, studios were shifted to wartime uses, and much export was halted. The two major firms, Pathé Frères and Léon Gaumont, also controlled circuits of theaters and they needed to fill vacant screens. As a result, in 1915 American films began to flood into France. Represented by De Mille’s The Cheat and films featuring Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, William S. Hart, and other popular stars, the Hollywood cinema dominated the market by the end of 1917. After the war, French filmmaking never fully recovered. The industry tried in several ways to recapture the audience, mostly through imitation of Hollywood production methods and genres. Alternatively, there emerged a movement consisting of younger directors: Abel Gance, Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, Marcel L’Herbier, and Jean Epstein.

Films and Feelings The previous generation had regarded filmmaking as a commercial craft, but the younger filmmakers wrote essays proclaiming cinema to be an art comparable to poetry, painting, and music. Astonished by the verve and energy of the American cinema, the young theorists compared Chaplin to a ballet dancer and the films of Hart to The Song of Roland. Cinema should, the young filmmakers argued, be what other arts were: a vehicle for feelings. Gance, Delluc, Dulac, L’Herbier, Epstein, and other members of the movement sought to put this idea into practice as filmmakers. Between 1918 and 1928, the younger directors experimented with cinema in ways that posed an alternative to the emerging Hollywood tradition.

The movement gained the name “Impressionist” because filmmakers wanted to give their narration subjective depth, to capture the momentary impressions that flit through a character’s mind. Believing that cinema should project heightened and subtle emotional states, the directors concentrated on intimate psychological stories. They favored situations with a small number of characters, often caught up in a love triangle, as in Gance’s La Dixième symphonie (1918), Delluc’s L’Inondation (1924), and Epstein’s Coeur fidèle (1923) and La Belle nivernaise (1923). These charged situations created fleeting moods and shifting sensations.

An Impressionist film replaces external action with an exploration of the characters’ inner life. Flashbacks depict memories; sometimes the bulk of a film will be one flashback or a series of them. The films register characters’ dreams, fantasies, and mental states. Dulac’s The Smiling Mme. Beudet (1923) consists almost entirely of the main character’s imaginary escape from a dull marriage. Despite its epic length (over five hours), Gance’s La Roue (1922) rests essentially on the erotic relations among only four people, and the director seeks to trace the development of each character’s feelings in great detail.

Subjective Style The movement earned its name as well for its distinctive film style. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had evoked its protagonist’s mental states through mise-en-scene, but the French relied more on cinematography and editing. In Impressionist films, optical effects such as superimpositions imply characters’ thoughts and moods (12.33). In La Roue, the image of Norma is laid over the smoke from a locomotive, representing the fantasy of the engine driver, who is in love with her. Going beyond mental subjectivity, the filmmakers try to register characters’ optical impressions as well. POV cutting is common, and so are shots suggesting altered states of perception. When a character in an Impressionist film gets drunk or dizzy, that experience is rendered in vertiginous camera movements, or slow motion, or distorted or filtered shots (12.34).

Another period arrived, that of the psychological and impressionist film. It would seem stupid to place a character in a given situation without penetrating into the secret realm of his inner life, and the actor’s performance is explained by the play of thoughts and of visualized sensations.” —Germaine Dulac, director

12.33

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12.34

12.33–12.34 Cinematography for subjectivity. In Coeur fidèle, the barmaid looks out a window, and a superimposition of the flotsam of the waterfront conveys her dejection at working in a dockside tavern (12.33). In El Dorado, a man’s tipsiness in a cabaret is conveyed by means of a curved mirror that stretches his body sideways (12.34).

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We consider the heritage of Expressionism and Impressionism in the work of Martin Scorsese, including Taxi Driver and Shutter Island, in “Scorsese, ’pressionist.”

The Impressionists also experimented with pronounced rhythmic editing to suggest the pace of an experience as a character feels it, moment by moment. During scenes of violence or emotional turmoil, the rhythm accelerates—the shots get shorter and shorter, building to a climax, sometimes with images only a few frames long. In Coeur fidèle, lovers at a fair ride in whirling swings, and Epstein presents their giddiness in a series of shots 4 frames, then 2 frames, long. In La Roue, a train crash is presented in accelerating shots ranging from 13 frames down to 2, and a man’s last thoughts before he falls from a cliff are rendered in a hail of single-frame shots. We’ve seen this pattern of accelerated editing in The Birds (p. 222), but these passages from La Roue are the first known instances of it.

Impressionist form and style put demands on film technology. Abel Gance, the boldest innovator in this respect, used his epic Napoléon (1927) as a chance to try new lenses (even a 275mm telephoto), multiple-frame images (called Polyvision), and widescreen ratio (the celebrated triptychs; see 5.70). Impressionists were especially interested in frame mobility. After all, if the camera was to represent a character’s eyes, it should be able to move with the ease of a person. Impressionists strapped their cameras to cars, carousels, and locomotives. For Gance’s Napoléon, the camera manufacturer Debrie perfected a handheld model that let the operator move on roller skates. Gance lashed the machine to wheels, cables, pendulums, and bobsleds. In L’Argent (1928), L’Herbier sent his camera gliding through huge rooms and plummeting down from the dome of the Paris stock exchange (12.35).

Such innovations had given French filmmakers the hope that their films could be as popular as Hollywood’s product. Some Impressionist films did appeal to the French public, but foreign audiences weren’t attracted. Two behemoth productions of the decade, Napoléon and L’Argent, failed and were reedited by the producers; they were among the last Impressionist films released. With the arrival of the sound film, the French film industry tightened its belt and had no money to risk on experiments.

Impressionism as a distinct movement may be said to have ceased by 1929. But the filmmakers’ explorations of psychological narrative and subjective style became a legacy to future generations. These innovations continued in the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Maya Deren, in Hollywood montage sequences, and in certain American genres and styles (the horror film, film noir). Even today, when a director wants to convey what a character is sensing or feeling in some abnormal state of mind, Impressionist techniques of camerawork and editing—blurred imagery, superimposition, slow motion, accelerating cutting—prove to be common choices (12.36; see also 3.42, from The Road Warrior).

Surrealism The French Impressionist filmmakers worked within the commercial film industry, but Surrealist filmmakers relied on private patronage and screened their work in small artists’ gatherings. Not surprisingly, Surrealist cinema was a more radical movement, producing films that would perplex and shock ordinary audiences.

Surrealist cinema was directly linked to Surrealism in literature and painting. According to its leader, André Breton, “Surrealism [is] based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association, heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.” The Impressionist filmmakers sought to catch the flow of consciousness as a tumble of sensations and memories. But Surrealist art, influenced by Freudian psychology, wanted to go deeper. Surrealists wanted to plumb the hidden currents of the unconscious.

Automatic writing and painting, the search for bizarre or evocative imagery, the deliberate avoidance of rationally explicable form or style: These became

12.35 The dizzying crane shot. In L’Argent, the camera drops toward the floor of the stock exchange in an effort to convey the traders’s frenzied excitement.

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12.36 Camerawork for hallucination. Impressionists would probably have admired the opening of Apocalypse Now (1979). Superimpositions, striking compositions, and the mixing of sounds and images of battle with the whirring of the overhead fan—all take us into Willard’s mind.

features of Surrealism as it developed in the period 1924–1929. From the start, the Surrealists were attracted to the cinema, especially films that presented untamed desire or the fantastic and marvelous. They admired slapstick comedies, Nosferatu, and serials about mysterious super- criminals. In due time, painters such as Man Ray and Salvador Dalí and writers such as Antonin Artaud began dabbling in cinema, while the young Spaniard Luis Buñuel, drawn to Surrealism, became its most famous filmmaker.

Hollywood filmmakers, the Expressionists, and the Impressionists were all committed to storytelling, even if their methods differed. But Surrealist cinema was anti-narrative, attacking causality and coherence. If rationality is to be fought, connections among events must be dissolved, as in The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928—scripted by Artaud, filmed by the Impressionist Germaine Dulac; 12.37) In Dalí and Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1928), the hero drags two pianos, stuffed with dead donkeys, across a parlor. In Buñuel’s L’Age d’or (1930), a woman begins obsessively sucking the toes of a statue.

But even while banishing causality, many Surrealist films tease us to find it. It becomes as evasive as in a dream. Instead, we find events juxtaposed for their disturbing effect. The hero gratuitously shoots a child (L’Age d’or), a woman closes her eyes only to reveal eyes painted on her eyelids (Ray’s Emak Bakia, 1927), and—most horrifying of all—a man strops a razor and deliberately slits the eyeball of an unprotesting woman (12.38). An Impressionist film would motivate such events as a character’s dreams or hallucinations, but in these films, character psychology can’t be determined. Sexual desire, violence, blasphemy, and bizarre humor take the place of conventional narrative. The hope was that the free form of the film would arouse the deepest impulses of the viewer, even if those impulses were unsavory. Buñuel called Un Chien andalou “a passionate call to murder.”

The style of Surrealist cinema is eclectic. Mise-en-scene is often influenced by Surrealist painting. The ants in Un Chien andalou come from Dalí’s pictures; the pillars and city squares of The Seashell and the Clergyman hark back to the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. Surrealist editing is an amalgam of some Impressionist devices (many dissolves and superimpositions) and some devices of the dominant cinema. The shocking eyeball-slitting at the start of Un Chien andalou relies on continuity editing as well as the Kuleshov effect (p. 226). However, discontinuous editing is also commonly used to fracture space and time. In Un Chien andalou, a

12.37

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12.37–12.38 Surrealists’ irrational imagery. The Seashell and the Clergyman: the clergyman’s distorted view of a threatening military officer, inexplicably dressed in baby’s clothes (12.37). A shocking eye-slitting scene opens Un Chien andalou (12.38).

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12.39 Surrealism’s heritage. The mysterious ear, discolored and covered with ants, discovered at the opening of Blue Velvet (1986) recalls Un Chien andalou.

woman locks a man out of a room only to turn and find him inexplicably behind her. On the whole, Surrealist film style refused to define itself by any particular techniques, since that would order and rationalize what had to be an “undirected play of thought.”

The fortunes of Surrealist cinema shifted with changes in the art movement as a whole. By late 1929, when Breton joined the Communist Party, Surrealists were embroiled in internal dissension about whether communism was a political equivalent of Surrealism. Buñuel left France for a brief stay in Hollywood and then returned to Spain. The chief patron of Surrealist filmmaking, the Vicomte de Noailles, supported Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite (1933), a film of Surrealist ambitions, but then stopped sponsoring the avant-garde. As a unified movement, French Surrealism was no longer viable after 1930.

Individual Surrealists continued their efforts, however. The most famous was Buñuel, who continued to work in his own brand of the Surrealist style for 50 years, in films such as Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). He was followed by other filmmakers, including the avant-gardist Kenneth Anger. Similarly, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr. owe a good deal to Breton’s demand to plumb the unconscious mind “in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic and moral preoccupation” (12.39).

Soviet Montage (1924–1930) Few artists were as determined to shake up filmmaking as the men and women who came of age during the Russian Revolution of October 1917. In all the arts, the call went out for a new way of seeing, and the creation of an art that would reflect Communist social ideals. The film world was galvanized by young people who scorned the current customs. They wanted to forge a cinema that would be revolutionary in subject, theme, form, and style. They wanted to provide filmmakers with brand-new tools.

Most Russian films made before the revolution were somber, slow-paced melodramas featuring bravura performances by popular stars (12.40). The dominant style favored long takes and intricate staging. One master of the period was Yevgenii Bauer, who brought pictorial elegance to tales of flirtation and betrayal among the upper classes. (See 4.131–4.134.) The young filmmakers, fascinated by continuity editing and the extroverted, athletic performance style in Westerns and comedies, saw the Hollywood style as the cutting-edge approach. But the aspiring directors didn’t simply copy the American methods. They pushed them to the limit, in the process creating a new and distinctive set of filmmaking tools.

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We analyze Bauer’s masterful staging in his upper-class melodramas in “Watching movies very, very slowly” and “What’s left to discover today? Plenty.”

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12.40 The tsarist style. In Yakov Protazanov’s 1916 The Queen of Spades, the gambling-addicted hero, played by the popular Ivan Mozhukin, imagines himself winning at cards, with his vision superimposed at the right.

Artists and the State The government aimed to remake all sectors of life. At first, policy makers tried to nationalize all private property. In response, film companies simply refused to supply films to theaters operating under the government control. In July 1918, the State Commission of Education put strict controls on the existing supplies of raw film stock. As a result, producers began hoarding their stock; the largest firms took all the equipment they could and fled to other countries. Some companies made films commissioned by the government, while hoping that the Reds would lose the Civil War and that things would return to pre-Revolutionary conditions.

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Like other Soviet industries, film production and distribution took years to build up a substantial output. To fill the void in theaters, American films, particularly those of D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, circulated for years. They became a tremendous influence on young filmmakers.

Faced with little equipment and difficult living conditions, a few young filmmakers made tentative moves that would result in the development of a national cinema movement. Dziga Vertov shot documentary footage of the war; at age 20, he was placed in charge of all newsreels. Lev Kuleshov, in his early 20s, was teaching in the newly founded State School on Cinema Art. There he built up a series of experiments by assembling footage, some that he shot, some from existing films, into short segments that created an impression of continuity (pp. 225–226). Kuleshov, perhaps the most conservative of the young Soviet filmmakers, tried to systematize principles of editing based on the emerging Hollywood style. Even before they were able to make films, Kuleshov and his young pupils were working at the first film school in the world and writing theoretical essays on the new art form. This grounding in theory would be the basis of the Montage style.

Other young people moved into cinema, often from scientific backgrounds. The engineer Sergei Eisenstein began directing plays in a workers’ theater in Moscow. For one 1923 production he made a short film, and soon he was directing a feature. Vsevolod Pudovkin, trained in chemistry, made his acting debut in a play presented by Kuleshov’s State Film School. He had been inspired to go into filmmaking by seeing Griffith’s Intolerance, and he would make his first feature a few years later. Some tsarist-era directors, Protozanov, for example, would continue to work under the Soviet regime, but the breakthroughs came from newcomers.

NEP Cinema Circumstances favored their rise. By 1921, the country was facing tremendous problems, not least a widespread famine. To facilitate the production and distribution of goods, Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy (NEP), which for several years permitted private management of business and a measure of free enterprise. For film, the NEP meant a sudden reappearance of film stock and equipment. Slowly, Soviet production began to grow as private firms made more films.

“Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important,” Lenin stated in 1922. Since Lenin saw film as a powerful tool for education, the first films encouraged by the government were documentaries such as Vertov’s newsreel series Kino-Pravda. Soviet fictional films were being made from 1917 on, but it was not until 1923 that a Georgian feature, Red Imps, became the first Soviet film to compete successfully with the foreign films dominating local screens. And not until 1927 did the industry’s income from its own films top that of the films it imported.

The NEP brought forth a burst of fresh, daring films from the youngsters. From Kuleshov’s class at the State Film School came The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924; 12.41). This satiric comedy, along with Kuleshov’s next project, The Death Ray (1925), were stunningly different from the tsarist cinema—fast-paced, full of stunts, chases, and fights, and cut with the freedom of an American film. Kuleshov showed that a Soviet film could be as entertaining as the Hollywood product. Eisenstein’s first feature, Strike (1925) mixed cartoonish satire with violent action, including a workers’ massacre intercut with the slaughter of a bull. Although it wasn’t seen outside the USSR until decades later, historians now consider it the first full-blown exercise in the Montage style. Eisenstein’s next film, The Battleship Potemkin (1925), came to epitomize the new movement. Stupendously successful abroad, it was praised as a masterpiece. Over the next few years, as silent cinema was coming to an end, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, Alexander Dovzhenko, and other directors created films that became classics.

Everyone who has had in his hands a piece of film to be edited knows by experience how neutral it remains, even though a part of a planned sequence, until it is joined with another piece, when it suddenly acquires and conveys a sharper and quite different meaning than that planned for it at the time of filming.” —Sergei Eisenstein, director

12.41 Soviet satire. The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks: A gang of thieves terrifies the naive American, Mr. West, by presenting him with clichéd caricatures of fierce Soviet revolutionaries.

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The Priority of Editing What was the basis of the Montage movement? In their writings and films, these directors championed editing over all other film techniques. This was a clear attack on the long-take style that had dominated earlier Russian film. Inspired by viewings of American and French Impressionist films, the young Soviet directors declared that a film’s power arose not from the delicate performances of expert actors, but from the combination of shots. Through editing, they maintained, two shots give birth to a feeling or idea not present in either one. This is the insight behind Kuleshov’s experiments. If you intercut different images with impassive shots of a man’s face, or show a couple looking offscreen and then a shot of a building, the editing is what endows the performance with meaning. Here the Soviets went beyond their Hollywood peers, who counted on star actors to help carry the story.

“Montage,” the Russian word for cutting, seemed to show the way forward for modern cinema. But not all of the young theoreticians agreed on exactly what the Montage approach to editing should be. Pudovkin, for example, believed that shots were like bricks, to be joined together to build a sequence. Eisenstein disagreed, saying that the maximum effect would be gained if the shots did not fit together perfectly, if they created a jolt for the spectator. Many filmmakers tried out discontinuities of this sort (12.42). Eisenstein also favored juxtaposing shots to create an abstract theme, as we’ve already seen with his use of conceptual editing in October (pp. 259–262). Vertov disagreed with both theorists. He disapproved of the fiction film altogether and promoted montage-based documentary cinema, as in Man with a Movie Camera (pp. 432–436).

However the filmmakers might have disagreed in debate, they often converged in practice. Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia makes use of conceptual editing similar to that of Eisenstein’s October. Shots of a military officer and his wife being dressed in their accessories are intercut with shots of the preparation at the temple. Pudovkin’s parallel montage points up the absurdity of both rituals (12.43–12.46). Elsewhere Storm over Asia employs many jump cuts, breaking spatial and temporal coherence for the sake of stirring the spectator’s senses. American continuity style taught the Montagists the power of editing, but once they learned the lesson, they pushed the technique in radical directions that would have shocked Hollywood filmmakers.

The Montage movement went even farther beyond Hollywood in their approach to narrative. Soviet films tended to downplay character psychology as a trigger for plots; instead, social forces provided the major causes. Characters were interesting not as individuals but as examples of how large-scale processes affected people’s lives. As a result, Soviet Montage films didn’t always have a single protagonist. Social groups could form a collective hero, as in Eisenstein’s early films. In the October sequence (pp. 260–262), his editing shows how social groups, such as the soldiers at the front or the women and children on the breadlines, are victimized by brutal government policies.

In keeping with this downplaying of individual personalities, Soviet filmmakers often preferred to cast non-actors. This practice was called typage, since the filmmakers would often choose an individual whose appearance seemed directly to convey the type of character in the role. Except for the hero, Pudovkin used non-actors to play all the Mongols in Storm over Asia.

The Movement Ends By the late 1920s, each of the major directors of this movement had made about four important films. The decline of the movement was not caused primarily by industrial and economic factors, as in Germany and France. Instead, the Communist government came to disapprove of the Montage style. Vertov,

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For more on Eisenstein’s approach to editing, see “Seed-beds of style.”

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12.42 Discontinuity for shock. In House on Trubnoi Square, Montage director Boris Barnet uses a jump cut to convey the heroine’s sudden realization that a streetcar is headed straight for her.

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12.43

12.44

12.45

12.46

12.43–12.46 Crosscutting for thematic parallels. In Storm over Asia, Pudovkin shows a medium close-up of an elaborate piece of jewelry being lowered over the head of a priest (12.43). Cut to a close-up of a servant placing a necklace around the neck of the officer’s wife (12.44). Cut back to a large headdress being positioned on a priest’s head (12.45). Cut to a close-up of a tiara being set on the wife’s head (12.46).

Eisenstein, and Dovzhenko were criticized for their excessively formal and esoteric approaches. In 1929, Eisenstein went to Hollywood to study the new technique of sound; by the time he returned in 1932, the attitude of the film industry had changed. While he was away, a few filmmakers carried their Montage experiments into sound cinema. But the Soviet authorities, under Stalin’s direction, encouraged filmmakers to create simple films that would be readily understandable to all audiences. Stylistic experimentation and nonrealistic subject matter were condemned.

This trend culminated in 1934, when the government instituted a new artistic policy called Socialist Realism. This policy dictated that all artworks must depict revolutionary development while being firmly grounded in realism. The Montage theories of the 1920s had to be discarded or modified. Eisenstein continued experimenting with editing and occasionally incurred the wrath of the authorities until his death in 1948. As a movement, the Soviet Montage style can be said to have ended by 1933, with the release of such films as Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931) and Pudovkin’s Deserter (1933).

Yet like other silent film movements, its legacy proved enormous. As Kuleshov and his pupils imitated American films, Hollywood borrowed Soviet strategies by creating the “montage sequences” (p. 252) that became common in the 1930s and are still used today. American filmmakers have paid homage to The Battleship Potemkin in movies as different as Bananas and The Untouchables. The films of Resnais, especially Hiroshima mon amour, Muriel, and La Guerre est finie, rework Soviet Montage principles. Even more pervasive were Montage influences on avant-garde filmmaking. Makers of found-footage films such as A Movie owe a good deal to Vertov’s Kino-Eye, and Eisenstein’s idea that discontinuity in editing was one creative option underwrote many modern experiments (12.47). The writings of the Montage directors, with their passionate call for breaking with the past, have inspired young filmmakers to make daring creative choices.

12.47 Discontinuity multiplied. Panels from old comic books, panned over jerkily and cut together disjunctively, are glimpsed in Lewis Klahr’s Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy (2003–2004). In a test of Soviet Montage theories, we’re invited to assemble the fragmentary shots into an ominous story of crime and panic.

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The Classical Hollywood Cinema after the Coming of Sound (1926–1950) The arrival of synchronized sound filming in the late 1920s dramatically shows how technological change can widen a filmmaker’s creative choices. Before that, nearly all music heard in cinema was played on the spot, provided by a piano, organ, or an orchestra. Sound effects might be added; some organs could mimic pistol shots. But there would be no spoken dialogue. The silent cinema had written language in its intertitles, but not speech.

You can argue that film form and style would have been very different if cinema could have recorded spoken dialogue when movies began. Wouldn’t the line of least resistance have been to simply photograph stage performances? If cinema had not been condemned to silence, would actors like Chaplin and Fairbanks have developed such a visually expressive performance style? Would Griffith and other directors have developed crosscutting and continuity editing? Would the Impressionists have tried to render the fluidity of thought, or the Soviet Montagists sought to make conceptual points through their cutting patterns? More likely, as many writers thought at the time, cinema would have become primarily a recording medium, and films would have been canned theater, like television situation comedy.

From this perspective, the absence of recorded speech was a great gift. It drastically constrained filmmakers’ choices. It pushed them to find ways of telling stories visually, and the results yielded a new art form.

With the advent of synchronized sound, filmmakers faced perhaps the most important decision point in film history. Should they give up all the resources of film form and style developed over 30 years of silent moviemaking? Should they simply turn movies into photographed stage plays? Or should filmmakers try to integrate spoken language, along with music and effects, into the sophisticated visual storytelling of the late silent era? Or were there still other options? The decision would shape the future of a medium that was already still very young compared to the other arts.

Converting to Sound Like many media technologies, synchronized sound was born from a business decision. During the mid-1920s, Warner Bros. was expanding its facilities and holdings. One of these expansions was the investment in a sound system using records in synchronization with film images. By releasing Don Juan (1926) with orchestral accompaniment and sound effects on disc, along with a series of vaudeville shorts with singing and talking, Warner Bros. began to popularize the idea of sound films. In 1927, The Jazz Singer (a part-talkie with some scenes accompanied only by music) was a tremendous success, and the Warner Bros. investment began to pay off.

The success of Don Juan, The Jazz Singer, and the shorts convinced other studios that sound contributed to profitable filmmaking. Unlike the era of the Motion Picture Patents Company, there was now no fierce competition within the industry. Firms realized that whatever sound system the studios finally adopted, it would have to be compatible with the projection machinery of any theater. Eventually, the sound-on-disc system was rejected and a sound-on-film one became the standard up to the present. As we saw in Chapter 1, the sound track was printed on the strip of film alongside the image. By 1930, most theaters in America were wired for sound. The question for filmmakers was: What to do with this new technology?

You know, when talkies first came in they were fascinated by sound—they had frying eggs and they had this and that—and then people became infatuated with the movement of the camera; I believe, the big thing right now is to move a handheld camera. I think the director and his camerawork should not intrude on the story.” —George Cukor, director

Problems and Solutions It seemed for a few years that much of the visual storytelling of the silent era would be lost. Camera positions were more limited, because the camera had to be put inside a soundproof booth so that its motor noise would not be picked up by the

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475 microphone (12.48). The camera operator could hear only through his earphones, and the camera could not move except for short pans to reframe. The bulky microphone, on the table at the right in 12.48, also did not move. Complicated staging was ruled out because the actors had to stay close to the microphone. Often several cameras in their booths were filming from different angles, so lighting had to be rather broad and flat; it could not be tailored to a particular shot. Such restrictions seemed to confirm critics and filmmakers’ worst fears: Movies would now be static and stagey.

Still, from the very beginning of sound filming, problems were solved. When several cameras recorded the scene from different angles, the footage could be cut together to provide continuity editing patterns, complete with close-ups. A booth might be mounted on wheels to create camera movements, or a scene might be shot silent and a sound track added later. Early sound films such as Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929) showed that the camera could regain considerable flexibility of movement. Later, equipment manufacturers came up with smaller enclosures that replaced the cumbersome booths. These blimps (12.49) permitted cinematographers to place the camera on movable supports. Similarly, microphones mounted on booms and hanging over the heads of the actors could also follow moving action and maintain recording quality.

It became clear that instead of wiping out all the options of classical Hollywood form and style, recorded sound would be integrated into that system. Once cutting, camera movement, and fluid staging were restored, filmmakers returned to many of the stylistic characteristics developed in Hollywood during the silent period. Diegetic sound provided a powerful addition to the system of continuity editing. A line of dialogue could continue over a cut, creating smooth temporal continuity. (See pp. 273–275.) In addition, music could be more precisely timed to the action than was possible in live accompaniment. Max Steiner’s scores for The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and King Kong (1933) showed that music could powerfully enhance both the image and spoken dialogue—sometimes amplifying frenzied action, sometimes quietly stressing a single sentence.

Studios, Genres, and Spectacle Within the overall tradition of continuity style and classical narrative form, each of the large studios developed a distinctive approach. Thus MGM, for example, became the prestige studio, with a huge number of stars and technicians under long-term contract. MGM lavished money on settings, costumes, and special effects, as in The Good Earth (1937), with its locust attack, and San Francisco (1936),

12.48

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12.48–12.49 From booth to blimp. A posed publicity still demonstrated the limitations of early sound filming (12.48). A blimped camera during the early 1930s allowed more freedom of camera placement (12.49).

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Some of these early sound and color films can be hard to find, but we look at some DVD collections that provide lots of information and clips in “All singing! All dancing! All teaching!”

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