Film

FILM

FILM. Thomas Edison's company copyrighted its machine-viewable Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze in January 1894. Two years later the first public showings of projected Vitascope images took place on Thirty-fourth Street in New York City. These public debuts, culminating decades of technical development, mark the beginnings of American cinema. The medium was quickly extended by innovations by French filmmakers the Lumière brothers, who introduced sequences, close-ups, using directors to construct scenes. French film artist, Georges Méliès introduced concepts of repeatable time, rather than progressive movement toward the future. Edison was, in fact, only presenting on screen materials that had been available in Kinetoscope viewing machines for several years. The Edison Corporation soon added footage on Coney Island, and further benefited by an embargo placed on Lumière Productions by the U.S. Customs Service. Although Edison attempted to monopolize the new industry, other companies circumvented his patent and challenged his hegemony in court. Edison attempted a further monopoly in 1907 by requiring royalties for use of his machines. That year Edison made a pact with a number of film studios that created the Motion Picture Patents Company in another attempt to secure a monopoly.

After several years of shakeups in the fledgling industry, companies such as Biograph began producing spectacles, Photographing a Female Crook (1904) among them, or full scale literary adaptations, for example, Edwin S. Porter's version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903). Porter also introduced popular concepts of romance and sexuality in The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903), of violence in The Ex-Convict (1904), and crime in The Kleptomaniac (1905). His Great Train Robbery (1903) gave audiences western settings and stories, and demonstrated film's powerful special effects such as constructing audience vision through perspective, narration, and space.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, audiences were clearly choosing fiction over documentary footage. Film presentation moved from vaudeville houses into permanent motion picture houses (nickelodeons) that offered amenities to attract women. Construction of motion picture houses also allowed for rental of film prints, to the great benefit of studio profits. Movie production companies became more complex; ancillary organizations such as fan magazines and professional criticism emerged. With the focus on a middle-class, family-oriented audience, companies began to be more careful about sexual content, although the rapid spread of theaters made self-policing untenable. Studio production moved from sites in Astoria (in New York City) and Ithaca, New York, to the sunny hills of Hollywood, California, which allowed for constant filming and varied sets to film on location.

Rise of Production Companies

Others, many of them immigrants, soon extended the field of film production. Adolph Zukor invested in a series of nickelodeons, then developed partnerships with Marcus Loew, William A. Brady, and the Shubert Brothers. One of their first projects was the purchase of the French Pathé film Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt, for showing in New York City in 1912. Zukor used the movie business to transform himself creatively and financially with longer films. The use of Bernhardt coincided with public fascination with actors. Zukor's Famous Players is noted for introducing Mary Pickford, who became the biggest star of the 1910s, especially after her marriage to actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Fairbanks exemplified the industry's healthy, tanned, sports personality; Pickford extended an older American myth about the rise of a talented, beautiful woman to success. In 1919, the couple aligned themselves with director David Wark Griffith and comedian Charlie Chaplin to create United Artists, a move that at least partly loosened the studios' grip on film production and distribution. Griffith is important for his extraordinary energy (he directed one hundred and forty movies in 1909 alone), creative innovation of running shots, narrative, intertitles (which made up for lack of the human voice), and epic films. The best known of these was the controversial Birth of a Nation (1915), which set forth a southern vision of the Civil War and the South's saving of the nation through racism. Immediately denounced by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the film marries America's technical achievement and racial intolerance.

Still, many films were romantic fiction, such as the serial Perils of Pauline, which ran many episodes before 1915. The serial inspired young girls such as Anna May Wong, a Chinese American teenager, who decided upon a film career after many viewings. Her exposure was part of the mixed ethnic legacy of early film. While film helped Jews and Italians assimilate into American culture, it drew a sharp line for Asians and African Americans, who either had to develop their own cinema or endure the racism of Hollywood productions. Beginning in the 1910s some of the most famous productions—such as Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915), with its Asian villain, and Griffith's Birth of a Nation —included strongly racist messages.

Hollywood Triumphant

World War I had less impact on films in the United States than in European nations; by 1918, American studios had emerged as the world leaders because they could spend more money for sets and costumes than could European studios. Money and exoticism combined in the construction of new theaters, many of them, such as the famous Grauman Chinese Theater, designed in a style of art deco orientalism. The splendor of these palaces of cinema reflected the global power of Hollywood by the mid-1920s.

Hollywood not only took over the world, but had also wrested away the final shreds of studio power from New York City by 1925. Hollywood meant industry consolidation, specific modes of production, and directorial independence. During the classic era of silent film in the 1920s, a host of European immigrant directors, including Erich von Stroheim and Joseph von Sternberg, introduced expressionism to American audiences.

Hollywood studios offered several genres. The woman's film featured newer stars such as Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and Anna May Wong; comedies had Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, W. C. Fields, and Buster Keaton. Lon Chaney, the man of a thousand faces, was the master of horror. Robert Flaherty produced outstanding documentary films. The milieu of the 1920s produced the gangster movie. Fans of each genre could follow their favorites through glossy magazines.

Hollywood did not accurately portray all Americans. Generally excluded were blacks, who, of necessity, formed their own production companies. Oscar Micheaux produced dozens of films including his classic Body and Soul (1924), starring Paul Robeson. Hollywood continued to use racist stereotypes; Al Jolson's film The Jazz Singer (1927) revived the discredited minstrel tradition.

Sound and Talent

Sound was by far the greatest innovation of the late 1920s. Filmmakers had experimented in color, most notably in The Toll of the Sea (1922), starring Anna May Wong, but the results were inconclusive. Silent films were always accompanied by music; the introduction of the human voice was revolutionary. Awkward or squeaky voices cost such stars as John Gilbert their careers. Hollywood was a magnet for the world's talent. As the studios perfected a "dream machine" in which mass appeal films dominated, Europe's stars came to California attracted by promises of wealth and fame: Greta Garbo of Sweden, Anna Sten of Russia, and, most famously, Marlene Dietrich of Germany. Talking films ("talkies") promoted Nordic women as the paradigms of female beauty. This emphasis, joined with the star system, made standard a type of beauty. Hollywood's choices had a powerful impact on the nation's concept of female beauty and appropriate behavior.

Hollywood was concerned with profits and popularity; studios kept their ears to the ground to learn about public concerns about crime and then pumped out more gangster films. During the depression of the 1930s, musicals with elaborate dance productions and optimistic songs distracted audiences; comedy, now featuring assimilated Yiddish humor through the Marx Brothers, helped in the hard times. However, sexual innuendo of the films of the 1920s was eventually tempered, as were any hints of interracial love, by a rigid Production Code (implemented in 1930) and state licensing system. After a film passed the Production Code Administration office, it still might run afoul of state licensing boards. Their power in New York State, for example, could profoundly alter a script. Interracial kissing remained an informal taboo until the 1960s and beyond.

Hollywood's influence upon the nation was not limited to adults. Animation, accompanied by brilliant color, made Walt Disney a success in the 1930s. Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Snow White, and Pinocchio fascinated children. As experiments with color became more successful, narrative films began to use color. The 240-minute epic Gone with the Wind (1939), with its evocation of the slave South, used color to highlight its racial fantasies. The Wizard of Oz (1939) employed color to differentiate between "reality" and dream.

Black-and-white films still offered innovation, however. Orson Welles with Citizen Kane (1941) pushed lighting, angle shots, overlapping dissolves, and narrative construction to new levels.

Spreading the News

Theaters became organs of the news. Between Saturday afternoon features, audiences watched The March of Time (1935–1951), sponsored by Time magazine. As the nation geared up for World War II, the newsreels kept audiences informed. Most wartime films were B productions, inexpensive efforts relying on older cinematic methods; many were little more than propaganda. Films asked and answered who African Americans or Asians should fight for, showed how women could support the war, and gave reports of successful campaigns. Occasionally this could result in high art as in Casablanca (1942), with Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart.

Postwar Hollywood confronted major political challenges. Right-wing campaigns against alleged communist influence in Hollywood (often thinly disguised anti-Semitism), declining audiences, and postwar cutbacks influenced studio choices. The decade also evoked a new

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genre, eventually dubbed film noir by postwar French critics. In films like The Maltese Falcon (1942), Double Indemnity (1944), and Out of the Past (1947), American hardboiled crime fiction and a German-inspired expressionist sensibility combined to produce a bleak vision of limited human choices. The genre's themes of paranoia, betrayal, corruption, and greed seemed to speak for the American subconscious. Women in film noir, for example, often had the role of femme fatale, and their increased social and sexual freedom was negatively depicted. Other genres, however, supported an American agenda. Westerns remained popular and represented white racial powers over weaker, "evil" races. Former football player John Wayne epitomized the masculine myth of the cowboy. More middle-of-the-road were the portrayal of the bourgeois male in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), starring James Stewart, and the optimistic social criticism of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Hollywood also recycled older genres and started its own revisionism in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Singin' in the Rain (1952).

Technology

The 1950s boasted technical innovations such as three dimension (3-D) and widescreen films. While the 3-D film House of Wax was a big hit for Warner Brothers in 1953 and Americans were thrilled to put on special glasses for viewing, its time was short. Similarly, CinemaScope and Panavision briefly bolstered box office receipts for spectacles like The Robe (1953) and the Ten Commandments (1956), but by 1957, audiences were a quarter of the total they had been twenty years earlier. Television was a primary reason for the decline, as were such lifestyle changes as the deification of the nuclear family and sports activities. Still, powerful movies that affected American social styles continued to be made. Marlon Brando's performances in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954) prescribed dress and behavior patterns for generations of American males, as did James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (1955). Older genres such as the Western (The Searchers [1956]) and musical (West Side Story [1961]) showed stamina throughout the decade. The most innovative works of the late 1960s and early 1970s were done outside Hollywood. Rock music was a great influence. Documentary work such as D. A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967), on a Bob Dylan tour, the Maysles Brothers' production of Gimme Shelter (1970), on the illfated Altamonte Concert of the Rolling Stones, and Wood-stock (1970), chronicling the famous concert, charted the world of the new music. Frederick Wiseman's sober investigation of insane asylums (Titicut Follies [1967]) and several films on the Vietnam War showed the new political power of documentaries. Never interested in political movements in the past, Hollywood responded to the tumultuous 1960s with films on racial issues such as In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), both starring Sidney Poitier. The conflict between the generations was covered in The Graduate (1967) with Dustin Hoffman, who also starred in the gritty urban drama Midnight Cowboy (1969), with Jon Voight. The Western explored more favorable portrayals of Native Americans in Little Big Man (1970).

Experimental cinema captured the interest of intellectuals and college students. The work of Stan Brakhage, the Kuchar Brothers, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, and Maya Deren extended the possibilities of no-narrative film. Jonas Mekas worked to create an experimental archive in New York City. Some of the strangest, but ultimately successful, films were made by artist Andy Warhol, whose efforts included a twenty-four hour film of the Empire State Building, eight hours of a man sleeping, and films about the antics of his Factory crew.

The artistic challenges of Warhol and the influence of the French auteur theory manifested in the rise of a new generation of directors. The careers of such directors as Francis Ford Coppola with his highly successful Godfather series, George Lucas with American Graffiti (1973), Martin Scorsese with Taxi Driver (1976), and Steven Spielberg, whose biggest achievements came in the 1980s, showed the resilience of Hollywood. The 1970s have come to be considered a new Golden Age for personal cinema. Woody Allen, who strove to personify the New York intellectual in Manhattan (1979), Roman Polanski with the revival of film noir in Chinatown (1974), and Robert Altman with Nashville (1975), all achieved major success.

Special Effects

Artistry was not the biggest success, however, but rather special-effects spectaculars. Digitalization, improved special effects, and computer graphics helped such films as Star Wars (1977), the Indiana Jones series with Harrison Ford, and Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) to reinvent the concept of the "blockbuster" with extraordinary budgets and profits. Only with collapse of the hugely expensive Heaven's Gate in 1979 were the perils of this approach apparent. Its failure did not prevent Hollywood studios from plowing new cash into blockbuster comedies such as National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), starring John Belushi, and the Beverly Hills Cop series starring Eddie Murphy. Murphy and Whoopi Goldberg became the first black actors since Sidney Poitier in the 1960s to get star status and paved the way for similar success for Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Hallie Berry, and Samuel L. Jackson. The awarding of Oscars for best performances to Washington and Berry in 2002, and the lifetime achievement award to Poitier, seemed to mark a historic integration of the film industry. Such integration owed much to the efforts of director Spike Lee, whose films always took on the big issues. While blacks seem to have become part of the regular Hollywood crowd, the same cannot be said for Asians, none of whom have gained the prominence of Anna May Wong before 1940. Generally, the feminist movement made little other than stylistic improvements in Hollywood, which grudgingly accepted a few female directors after 1980. The same can be said for the gay movement, whose principal achievements have been limited to films about the AIDS crisis, although gay characters became more common in films in the late 1990s. Its biggest hit to date was Boys Don't Cry (1999) about the murder of a crossdresser in a small town in the Midwest.

Independents

The cinematic radicalism and independence of the previous twenty years rubbed off on new filmmakers in the 1990s. Quentin Tarantino, a film scholar turned director, scored with Pulp Fiction in 1994. Pulp Fiction went on to become a phenomenon on the Internet after 1996, with constant discussion of the film through chat-rooms and Web sites. More consistent in their quirky achievements were Joel and Ethan Coen, who regularly scored with offbeat melodramas such as Fargo (1996).

Despite the successes of independent visions, Hollywood still relied on the blockbuster, which it produced in series according to the season and age group. New technologies helped enliven Jurassic Park (1993), the mass appeal of Tom Hanks sparked Forrest Gump (1994), while computer graphics were the stars of Toy Story (1995). More traditional and successful were Independence Day (1996) and Titanic (1997). Computer graphics also greatly enhanced The Matrix (1999). All of these films again demonstrated American hegemony of world cinema, despite the rise of national filmmaking around the globe. Only occasionally have foreign-language films like Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957), Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), and Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) penetrated the U.S. market.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berry, Sarah. Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Charney, Leo, and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Cohen, Paula Marantz. Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Harpole, Charles, ed. History of the American Cinema. 10 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990–2003.

Kindem, Gorham. The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures. Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1982.

Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. New York: Free Press, 1987.

Rose, Steven J. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Sarris, Andrew. "You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet": The American Talking Film, History and Memory, 1927–1949. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film-Making in the Studio Era. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Segrave, Kerry. American Films Abroad: Hollywood's Domination of the World's Movie Screens. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997.

Sklar, Robert. A World History of Film. 2d ed. New York: Abrams, 2002.

Graham Russell Hodges

See also Cartoons ; Disney Corporation ; Hollywood ; Mass Media .