World War I

Although not the first conflict to touch cinema, the Great War, from August 1914 to November 1918, was unprecedented in scale. The visual power of film, combined with the aural suggestiveness of music, endowed cinema with a unique social function during the war. In both documentary and fiction, the war rallied the film industry to produce mass entertainment, education, and, of course, propaganda, as the industry fell under increasing government control. By the end of the war, cinema had achieved prestige as an art form appealing to the middle classes through the new picture palaces. In Europe, however, the conflict placed previously dominant national cinemas such as those of France and Italy in stasis, in some cases never to recover. Others, such as those of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia, found the blockade of foreign imports surprisingly fortuitous in fostering distinctive new cycles of production.

PEACE OR PREPAREDNESS?

In the period of early cinema, the United States was primarily concerned with its domestic market, but from 1909 the commercial advantage of exporting film overseas became clear. Although Hollywood had successfully exported before 1914, the dominance it achieved a few years later was made possible by the war. France had been the world leader in film export, with Italy and Denmark close behind; indeed, France had been at the forefront of cinema's development, with pioneering filmmakers such as Georges Méliès (1861–1938) and the Lumière brothers (Auguste Lumière [1862–1954] and Louis Lumière [1864–1948]) and the world's number one film producer, Pathé. But when Pathé made an ill-timed move to concentrate on US distribution rather than production, France's grip on its internal market slipped, allowing 50 percent of films shown in 1917 to be American. In addition, the French film industry, like that of Italy when it entered the war in 1917, suffered from the shutdown of all cinemas and productions during the first months of the war. Once Hollywood's international distribution moved from London to New York, US film companies began to gain control of foreign distribution to Latin America and the Far East. The dwindling supply of film stock exacerbated problems facing the European film industry and affected others as far away as China. Suddenly an enlarged export market granted Hollywood more reliable profit margins; hence film budgets increased, giving Hollywood's often powerfully escapist product added international appeal. With Europe distracted, Hollywood began to organize its various independent studios into the vertically integrated industry that emerged after the war. By 1919 five major studios were in place: Universal (1912), Warner Bros. (1913), Paramount (1914), Fox (1915), and United Artists (1919), as well as the three component companies of MGM (1914–1917).

With the declaration of war in Europe, US opinion was divided, not least because it had close ethnic ties with all the parties involved. Despite calls from the United Kingdom and France for support, President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) chose neutrality over intervention and continued trade with the belligerent powers against a rising tide of attacks on American shipping. The first propaganda film to call for US intervention was J. Stuart Blackton's (1875–1941) The Battle Cry for Peace (1915). The oxymoronically titled film warned against complacency by depicting the destruction of major American cities after the lowering of national defenses. The film received silent backing from the arms manufacturer Hudson Maxim.

Films calling for "peace" included Herbert Brenon's War Brides, based on the emotive vaudeville "playlet" by Marion Craig Wentworth and released in November 1916. Although set in an imaginary kingdom, the film was pointedly contemporary in showing its heroine commit suicide rather than bear children to be sacrificed in future battles. As an answer to Blackton's film, Thomas Ince's (1882–1924) celebrated Civilization (1916), under the advertising slogan "PEACE—The Battle Cry of Civilization," was another allegorical narrative with a war-mongering king. The king directs the engineer Count Ferdinand to wage submarine war—plainly referencing the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania—before the count converts to pacifism and sacrifices himself and his ship. After the count's resurrection to spread the message of peace, the king witnesses a vision of Christ foretelling the horrors of war, an image that borrows from the semireligious postcards popular during the war. This spiritualist iconography was highly influential on film both during and after the war, as evident, for example, in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), as the ghostly "resurrection" of Rudolph Valentino's soldier returns to his grieving wife.

"DO YOUR BIT FOR AMERICA"

The United States entered the war on 5 April 1917. President Wilson called on everyone to "Do Your Bit for America," and this included the film industry. At every level—helping with recruitment and fund-raising, making training films as well as inspirational fiction features featuring charismatic movie stars—cinema worked to align the nation to the political and social needs of the day. Producers, distributors, and exhibitors developed an approach of "practical patriotism," finding that business and patriotism could be mutually beneficial. The public was encouraged to attend not only for entertainment, but to participate in sweepstakes to win Liberty Bonds, thus offering the incentive of indirectly lining the pockets of Uncle Sam. Although only a minority of features directly referenced the war itself, the number of war-themed films increased over the course of the war, from eight in May 1917, when public opinion was predominantly antiwar, to fifty-four (many of which were prestige productions) at the time of the Armistice in August 1918.

Cinemas were frequently decked out with bunting or portraits of President Wilson to spark patriotic interest, while the singing of the national anthem and other patriotic songs, slide shows of local enlisted men, public lectures on war topics, and even the raising of colossal flags at every show fostered feelings of collective identity. For the third Liberty Loan campaign, the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI) distributed a film by Douglas Fairbanks (1918, 'Sic 'Em Sam') and over 17,000 advertising trailers and posters. NAMPI, established in July 1916, regulated the various sectors of the film industry and in May 1917 formed a War Cooperation Committee to further the interests of both the industry and the government. The Committee was advised on the latest guidelines on matters such as food conservation, and produced campaigns and short propaganda films. The studios sent out stars such as Mary Pickford (1892–1979) and Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) to address the public while its members were attached to key departments and divisions of government and the armed forces. On 28 April 1917 Motion Picture News proudly reported that the serial queen Pearl White (1889–1938) had ridden a steel beam to the twentieth story of a New York building, unfurled an American flag in the breeze, and called for all young men to enlist.

The Committee on Public Information (CPI) was formed in April 1917, with the journalist George Creel as chairman, and with the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy as members. It functioned to sustain voluntary censorship and oversee the making, distribution, and exhibition of propaganda films, particularly through its control of export licenses. Thus if an overseas territory were found to be exhibiting German material, the threat of withholding the more popular American films could be used to gain cooperation. Additionally, 20 percent of any shipment of entertainment film had to consist of "educational" material. Although the committee's remit included "motion picture films and photographs," a new Division of Films was created in September that year. The eminent American critic W. Stephen Bush wrote to the British trade journal The Bioscope on 19 May 1917, describing his efforts to organize motion picture exhibitors across the southern states into "keeping the flame of patriotism burning brightly." Adding to the motivation behind such efforts were fears that Texas would become a "second Belgium" if Germany executed plans to invade from Mexico, whose civil war until then had been competing with the European war for US headlines.

Although the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation would not permit Cecil B. DeMille to travel to Europe to visit the front lines, D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) was granted statesmanlike authority there to shoot Hearts of the World (1918). The film, partly financed by the British government, told the story of a small French village beset by war; the crew made much-publicized visits to the trenches in France to record real-life action scenes that would be intercut with reconstructions. Billed as "A Love Story of the Great War," it became one of biggest films of the period. In April 1918, a month after the premiere of Hearts of the World, the historian Francis Trevelyan Miller wrote to Griffith, hailing him as "the Greatest of War Historians." On 5 April 1918 the New York Times reported that, when the film was shown to an invited Broadway audience of critics and servicemen, the pastoral scenes before the coming of the war registered the most profoundly: "the theatre broke into applause just at some particularly beautiful landscape of rural vista." Making the film's propaganda angle clear, at the end of the screening Griffith himself stood to give a short speech, broken with emotion. The crowd then cheered footage of British and French leaders, whereas a "representation of the Kaiser was eagerly hissed." The following month Griffith, as president of the new Motion Picture War Service Association, was charged with the task of boosting the US war effort through sales of war bonds. However, the film was not as big a success as the British government had hoped. Audiences had grown tired of war films of any kind and instead sought information from newsreels. Hearts of the World was rereleased with a revised ending as a "peace edition" in 1919.

BRITAIN PREPARED

In the United Kingdom the need to continue with everyday life resulted in a business-as-usual approach by cinema managers, echoing the practical patriotism of the United States. In British theaters during the winter of 1915, audiences of uniformed men laughed at the broad comedy of pantomime one moment and sang melancholy war anthems, such as "Keep the Home Fires Burning," the next; in similar fashion, cinema's blend of reality with escapism was readily accepted. Movie theaters accommodated audiences seeking refuge from cold homes, offering an evening's entertainment and of course information about the war. They also raised funds for the war effort, as on Cinema Day, 9 November 1915, when the day's box-office takings were presented to the king and used to purchase fifty ambulances. Like the slide shows in the United States, local theaters also screened "Roll of Honor" films, greeted with both cheers and tears for those lost or wounded "over there." Many local scenes were particularly poignant. One film shown at the Imperial War Museum, London, specially shot for locals at the Tivoli Cinema in Grimsby, featured the "chums" of the Tenth Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment in training. The patrons were most likely unaware, when the film was shown on 4 July 1916, that the battalion had been wiped out on the first day of the Battle of the Somme three days earlier.

After protracted negotiations with the War Office, the first official propaganda film, Britain Prepared, was shown on 29 December 1915, complete with sequences in Kinemacolor, the world's first "natural" color process. Despite support from former President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) and US government officials along with the Patriotic Film Corporation, the director Charles Urban faced significant opposition in America when promoting the film there because of its preparedness message. The first two official cameramen were also dispatched to the front at this time, and their first footage, screened early the next year, complemented the domestic character of "Topical Budget" shorts until that point. Initial objections to filming the conflict were driven by a distaste for what some saw as the working-class nature of cinema—thus lacking the sophistication appropriate to the endeavor—and the belief that tight media control had aided the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905. In February 1918 Pictorial News (Official), under the auspices of Lord Beaverbrook's (1879–1964) Ministry of Information (MOI), replaced the "Topical" shorts. During the war 240 films and 152 issues of the official newsreel were released.

Film screenings, often amid the ruins of barns and outbuildings, became an increasingly popular entertainment among both Allied and German forces toward the end of the war. The British Mobile Cinema Unit, headed by Major A. C. Bromhead, brought films to audiences of up to nine thousand servicemen and women, with screenings projected using searchlight dynamos onto mobile, two-sided screens that toured around the four fronts of the war during 1916 and 1917. Smaller gatherings took place at hospitals, and footage was recut for different local audiences. Beaverbrook appeared in one edition of the newsreel Pictorial News (April 1918) inspecting a fleet of ten "Cine Motor-Cars," which were to be dispatched to "depict war truths in the villages." Under Beaverbrook, the style of Pictorial News films developed into a much more sophisticated and efficient narrative, with improved intertitles and more dynamic editing. Popular stars such as Ivy Close (1890–1968) were featured in shorts such as Women's Land Army (1917), calling for volunteers while declaring "weeds, like U-Boats, must be exterminated!" as female workers are superimposed on the cornfields before the image of Britannia appears at the end to pay tribute to her "toiling sisters." Films in other countries made use of similar tableaux, appropriating suitably iconic and relevant figures such as Joan of Arc. Cecil B. DeMille's (1881–1959) epic Joan the Woman (1917), for example, presented Joan as a transnational figure of unity and reconciliation for French, British, and American troops through a framing narrative set in a World War I trench.

The landmark British film of the period, however, was The Battle of the Somme (1916), the first and most successful of the three official "battle" features produced between summer 1916 and spring 1917 and one of the most successful and influential British films ever made. An estimated twenty million people saw the film within six weeks of its August release and the majority of the population soon after. Having the biggest impact in 1916 were sequences (subsequently believed to have been simulated) of men forsaking safety by going over the top of the trenches to engage the enemy (the origin of the idiom "over the top") and lingering images of the British and German dead. Audiences were shocked by the film's uncompromising images of war. The Battle of the Somme was shown around the world; in Canada, where the Department of Militia and Defense had called for

KING VIDOR
b. King Wallis Vidor, Galveston, Texas, 8 February 1894, d. 1 November 1982

In a film career whose durability was unrivalled by almost any other director, by the early 1920s King Vidor had developed a reputation as a morally earnest director of meaningful, atmospheric pictures about ordinary people in extraordinary and often hostile environments.

Vidor's early years were steeped in the movies. As a teenager he filmed footage for the Mutual Weekly newsreels of US troops sent to the border during the Mexican civil war. He continued to sell material on a piecemeal basis while working as a clerk at Universal, submitting scripts under the pseudonym Charles Wallis. Vidor gained recognition writing and directing independent features with The Turn in the Road and The Other Half (both 1919), starring his wife, Florence. After short contracts with First National and building his own small studio, Vidor Village, which closed in 1922, Vidor worked separately with Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn before working under the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in 1924, a relationship that would last twenty years. By turning down Ben-Hur (1925), Vidor was able to direct the World War I epic The Big Parade (1925). With a budget of $245,000, it is estimated to have made over $15 million in a few years at a time when few films made over a tenth of that. The film consolidated his reputation for working to erode social barriers through powerful images of ordinary people, as with the character played by James Murray in The Crowd (1928), the film that earned the director the first of six Academy Award^® nominations during his career.

Vidor's first sound film was the all-black musical drama, Hallelujah (1929). During the Depression, his socially aware film Our Daily Bread (1934) called for cooperative living. His "war, wheat, and steel" trilogy was completed with An American Romance (1944). After a few formula features Vidor was on form again, with the celebrated melodrama Stella Dallas (1937) and The Citadel (1938), a British film set in a Welsh mining town. In 1939 Vidor spent three weeks on the troubled shoot of The Wizard of Oz, notably directing the "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" sequence, one of cinema's most poignant expressions of personal isolation and the desire to escape. Duel in the Sun (1946), a huge hit, is a gloriously lurid western with an all-star cast.

In the 1950s he made fewer films; his epic Italian-American co-production War and Peace (1956) brought Oscar^® recognition once again, but his directorial career ended with Solomon and Sheba (1959). In 1979 Vidor was recognized with an honorary Academy Award^® for "incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator."

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Jack Knife Man (1920), Peg o' My Heart (1922), The Big Parade (1925), The Crowd (1928), Hallelujah (1929), The Champ (1931), Our Daily Bread (1934), Stella Dallas (1937), Northwest Passage (1940), Duel in the Sun (1946), The Fountainhead (1949), Ruby Gentry (1952), Man Without a Star (1955)

FURTHER READING

Baxter, John. King Vidor. New York: Monarch Press. 1976.

Dowd, Nancy, and David Shepard, interviewers. King Vidor. Hollywood, CA: Director's Guild of America; Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988.

Schickel, Richard. The Men Who Made the Movies: Interviews with Frank Capra, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh and William A. Wellman. New York: Atheneum, 1975.

Vidor, King. A Tree Is a Tree. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953.

——. King Vidor on Film Making. New York: McKay, 1972.

Michael Williams

certain images to be censored early in 1915, some scenes of warfare were cut.

After The Battle of the Somme, Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the most significant film of the period for British audiences. The film was shown only in theaters and not cinemas, sparking debate among exhibitors, who felt they were being squeezed out because the theater showings attracted a middle-class clientele that did not normally frequent the cinema.

Both Allied and German governments had interests in influencing the populations of neutral countries through control of exhibition venues, particularly in Holland and Switzerland and also across Scandinavia. In February 1918 the Société Suisse d'Exploitation des Films, effectively a field outpost of the CPI, warned Washington that German agents were penetrating the best picture-houses in the larger cities of Switzerland and sent back black lists of firms trading with Germany. The Société attempted to screen war films on behalf of the Allies, with some success in that The Battle of the Somme was seen by some 75,000 Swiss. The American CPI and British MOI formed a joint company to ensure that a sympathetic cinema, exclusively showing American, British, and French films, could be established in each major city in the country. The two bodies discussed whether the company should attempt to block all German product but agreed on a ratio of one-third German to two-thirds Allied. At the same time, material exported to such sensitive destinations was to be carefully censored so as not to play into enemy hands. For example, a commissioner warned the War Trade Board that Spanish audiences had interpreted one Pathé film as an accurate picture of life in New York, inadvertently serving as propaganda for the Germans.

EUROPE

Given its supremacy before the war, French cinema was perhaps the hardest hit in Europe. After the initial closure, cinema-going actually boomed in France during the war, theaters and other entertainment venues having been closed for the duration. As there was insufficient French material to screen, Hollywood imports, particularly adventure serials, began to dominate, as did their European imitations. As in the United Kingdom, authorities were slow to produce war material for the screen. It was left to private producers to gather material until the beginning of 1915, when an agreement was reached with the War Ministry allowing them to continue filming under supervision, resulting in more than five hundred shorts, particularly the official newsreel War Annals; from 1917 this newsreel was also distributed in Britain with bilingual intertitles. From January 1917 an Army Cinema Section produced all footage, which all cinemas were obliged to screen. A new generation of French directors emerged in August 1918, among them Abel Gance (1889–1981), who was granted permission to shoot footage of battle scenes for his acclaimed antiwar feature J'accuse! (1919). Billed as "the most romantic tragedy of modern times," the film tells the story of a soldier, Jean Diaz, driven to the brink of insanity by the memory of his comrades being slaughtered needlessly on the eve of the Armistice. Gance powerfully conveys his indignation at the loss of a generation that fell in battle by showing the war dead rising from their graves to bear witness to the living. Scenes of the real-life war injured parading past the camera (Gance was supported by various veterans' organizations), presenting their disfigured bodies and faces in stark close-up, are among the most powerful images to come from the war.

Having led the way in screen epics just before the war with films such as the internationally successful Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914), Italy set the standard for fully realizing cinema's potential for visual spectacle and technical virtuosity, matched only by Griffith's Intolerance (1916). Only three months after Italy entered the war in 1915, the release of Sempre nel cor la Patria!(My Country is Always in my Heart, Carmine Gallone, 1915) marked the beginnings of the popular patriotic genre. Depicting an Italian woman's heroic self-sacrifice, the film gained a realistic sense of destruction from being filmed amid the recently earthquake devastated region of Abruzzo. Increased censorship of the harsher images of the war facilitated the blending of patriotic with fantastical elements and collectivity being individualised into the heroic struggle of enduring popular heroes and warrior imagery that would be appropriated by the Fascist party after the war. Machiste alpino (1916) brought the superhuman Machiste of Cabiria returned to the screen to join the war effort. Comedies and epics were produced alongside more overtly propagandistic features such as

ABEL GANCE
b. Paris, France, 25 October 1889, d. 10 November 1981

Abel Gance was a pioneering and influential French writer, director, and producer known for his visual experimentation.

He made his screen debut in Molière in 1909, at the same time reluctantly accepting a job in a law office and hoping to make his mark on the stage. Struggling through poverty and illness, Gance set up a production company in 1911, and that year directed his first film, La Digue. Kept out of the war by continued illness, Gance achieved renown for his innovative optical effects (it is said that he introduced the close-up to French cinema) and mobile camera work as a director for the Film d'Art company with Mater dolorosa (The Torture of Silence, 1917) and La Dixième symphonie (The Tenth Symphony, 1918). These films were commercial and artistic successes, despite the concerns of his management that his visionary camera techniques were outlandish.

The most celebrated period of Gance's career began with his acclaimed antiwar feature J'accuse! (I Accuse, 1919), which was a hit across Europe and in the United States. After the death of his wife from influenza, Gance traveled to the United States to recover from his loss while also promoting J'accuse! across the nation. Despite the admiration of D. W. Griffith and the offer of a contract from Metro, Gance returned to France. His next film, La Roue (The Wheel, 1923), the story of a railway mechanic, won acclaim and would later be cited as an influence by both Jean Cocteau and Akira Kurosawa.

The six-hour Napoléon (1927), displaying technical virtuosity, is Gance's masterpiece. The film mustered a cast of thousands, choreographed across a panoramic screen. Gance's Polyvision triptych process involved the simultaneous projection of three adjacent cameras to produce often startling montage effects when presented in suitably equipped theaters. As with J'accuse!, which Gance reworked into a new sound version in 1938, the director obsessively revisited Napoléon throughout his lifetime, first adding stereo sound effects in 1934. The director's belief in the Polyvision format remained undiminished into the 1950s, its effect akin to the counterpoint of Greek tragedy, the emotional shock involving the spectator in the film experience.

Gance founded Les Films Abel Gance in 1933 but achieved little autonomy in his work and relied on international backing. Gance's early sound work affected his later reputation, not least because French critics were largely unsympathetic to silent directors who attempted to make the transition into sound. However, in 1979 Napoléon was meticulously restored and screened in London and then New York in its original format and with a new score. Living just long enough to witness the critical acclaim that ensued, Gance could be satisfied that his reputation, particularly in France, was finally being restored.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

As Director: Mater Dolorosa (1917), La Dixième symphonie (1918), J'accuse! (1919), La Roue (1923), Napoléon (1927), Le Fin du monde (End of the World, 1931), Un grand amour de Beethoven (The Life and Loves of Beethoven, 1936), J'accuse! (1938), Cyrano et d'Artagnan (1963); As Writer: La Reine Margot (Queen Margot, 1954)

FURTHER READING

Kaplan, Nelly. Napoléon. London: British Film Institute, 1994.

King, Norman. Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle. London: British Film Institute, 1984.

Kramer, Steven Philip, and James Michael Welsh. Abel Gance. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

Michael Williams

La guerra e il sogno di Momi (Momi's Dream and the War, Segundo De Chomon, 1917), in which a young boy, after reading letters from the front, dreams of a war fought by puppets and of saving his father, whom he finds has returned upon waking. Another propaganda tale, Come mori Miss Cavell, related the cause célèbre of Germany's execution of English nurse Edith Cavell in 1915. The emotive theme was also exploited by other nations, such as the British Nurse and Martyr (Percy Moran, 1915) and US The Woman the Germans Shot (John G. Adolfi, 1918), while the death of a Belgian nurse, Gabrielle Petit, was depicted for the first Belgian war film to be made after the war, La Belgique martyre (The Martyrdom of Belgium, Charles Tutelier, 1919). At the end of the war, despite strong production and the foundation of the Unione Cinematographica Italiana, Italian film was now behind changed international tastes.

In Germany the cinema initially was deemed to be a lower form of art than theater, and thus the export market was undeveloped. However, the industry was expanding as the war began, not least because of the huge popularity of stars such as Henny Porten and the Danish Asta Nielsen. Indeed, there was a strong link between those two countries. Before the outbreak of the war, neutral Denmark's Nordisk was the world's second-largest producer of films, with distribution networks spanning the globe from Russia across Europe to the United States. However, as the company owned profitable first-run theaters within Germany—of which the German government would soon seize control, buying out its German subsidiary, Nordische Film GmbH, to set up Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa)—its exports were deemed part-German and banned from many markets, from November 1915 including the United Kingdom, soon joined by France and Italy. The October Revolution in Russia in 1917 blocked further trade, leaving Scandinavia as the main remaining market. Denmark's increasing isolation prevented contact with developments elsewhere in film art, while dwindling production left only two of six film companies at the end of the war.

The private German firms Eiko and Messter-Film had produced newsreels from the start of the war, partly working as a consortium with other German companies. These were subsumed within the civilian Deulig (Deutsche Lichtbild Gessellschaft) company in 1916, promoting German culture and economic interests around the world. It was not until January 1917 that the German government established the military-controlled Bild-und Film-Amt (BUFA), charged with oversight of propaganda matters. Germany's isolation during the war resulted in increased domestic production, and the next step in the consolidation of production and state interest was to subsume BUFA into Ufa (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) in December 1917 with 25 million marks of state capital, with the aim of deploying film to facilitate German success in the war. Ufa was built up from smaller companies, with production based at Babelsberg. This move anticipated that, at the end of the war, as a private enterprise Ufa would adopt a strategy of vertical integration under the leadership of Erich Pommer (1889–1966) and thus achieve dominance over the market. During the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), the company would benefit from an influx of talented artists from the former Austro-Hungarian empire and Russia, producing one of the most artistically dynamic, and internationally influential, cinemas in film history.

In Russia the borders closed to imports as the country entered the war. As elsewhere, the imperial government prohibited cameras from filming the actual conflict until late in 1916. However, cinema became the most popular form of entertainment, with 150 million movie tickets sold in 1916 alone. Despite a shortage of raw stock for filmmaking, it could be said that World War I saved Russia's indigenous film industry, as it did Germany's. Whereas once screens had been dominated by the French Pathé and Gaumont companies, from 1913 to 1916 the number of Russian firms making films rose from eighteen to forty-seven. Russia's isolation enabled a distinctive national style to emerge, particularly in melodrama. Stars such as Ivan Mozzhukhin (1889–1939) and Nathalie Lissenko (1886–1969) became hugely popular, and directors such as Yevgeni Bauer (1865–1917) produced work of world-class artistic quality. The Bolshevik Revolution changed everything as many personnel, including Mozzhukhin, fled the country. By 1919 the Russian industry was once again dominated by imports from Europe and the United States, with stars such as Charlie Chaplin becoming particularly popular. In the 1920s Vladimir Lenin's belief in cinema's primary importance for agitation and propaganda ("agit-prop"), as well as for entertainment, fostered an influential and politically engaged generation of filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), Dziga Vertov (1896–1954), and V. I. Pudovkin (1893–1953).

AFTERMATH

With the 1920s came the jazz age, providing distractions from events that for many were far from resolved. In Germany the social and psychological trauma caused by the war inspired the Expressionist movement. Contemporary anxieties were played out in the distorted, fantastical settings of films such as Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920) and Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922). Although this style gave German films a distinctive national aesthetic, their imagery haunted other films, as in the labyrinthine sets of Universal's The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and, as portrayed by the British star Ivor Novello (1893–1951) (also the composer of the patriotic war song "Keep the Homes Fires Burning"), the "horror-haunted" protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger (1927).

More explicit touches of the war came in King Vidor's (1894–1982) landmark 1925 epic The Big Parade. One of the film's most haunting sequences shows a group of men slowly being picked off by German rifles as they march through a French forest. Instructing a drummer to create a metronomic beat, the men pace in a "ballet of death," an effect Vidor requested that cinema managers reproduce during screenings. Although acclaimed internationally for its visual virtuosity, some British critics attacked the apparent unilateralism of the film in excluding the British "Tommy"; however, its commercial success was unprecedented. Paramount's Wings (1927) also made a big impact on audiences, who were by captivated by its realism, enhanced by sound effects blasting from behind the screen and extensive use of Magnascope. Paramount's Magnascope projection process, which effectively tripled the size of the screen at key moments, was used for other war films, including Wings, Old Ironsides (1926), the British drama The Guns of Loos (1928) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). The latter, Universal's adaptation of the best-selling 1929 German novel by Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), was part of a wave of antiwar narratives that appeared beginning in the late 1920s, including two of Britain's most powerful and underrated films of the early sound period, Tell England (1931) and Journey's End (1930). A war veteran himself, James Whale (1889–1957) directed the latter, both the original stage play and the film based on it, establishing what has been claimed as the missing link between the war and Universal's horror pictures. Whale made Frankenstein a year later, with its bleak landscape and the seemingly shell-shocked gait of the monster, clearly influenced by the war.

Cinema emerged from the war a mass cultural phenomenon. The studio system was consolidated in Hollywood and strengthened its grasp on world markets, war conditions having precipitated the end of French cinema's dominance and the rise of German cinema. Although stars in each country had embedded themselves as home-front personalities, an exodus of talent streamed toward America, not least from France; the French comedian Max Linder (1883–1925) left for a $5,000 weekly salary in Hollywood. Chaplin, whose comic Shoulder Arms (1918), released shortly after the Armistice, was now earning cinema's first million-dollar salary, a sign of how times had changed. Whereas isolation had supported the independence of cinema in Sweden during the war, the loss of directors Mauritz Stiller (1883–1928) and Victor Sjöström (1879–1960) to Hollywood afterward contributed to a fall in fortunes for Svenska, the leading company. War narratives would resonate during the interwar years on both an implicit and explicit level in all forms of cultural production, particularly in the 1920s, when the images of the war continued to shape cultural memory.

SEE ALSO Propaganda;War Films

FURTHER READING

Brownlow, Kevin. The War, the West and the Wilderness. London: Secker and Warburg, 1979.

Campbell, Craig W. Reel America and World War I: A Comprehensive Filmography and History of Motion Pictures in the United States, 1914–1920. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 1985.

DeBauche, Leslie Midkiff. Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War One. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Dibbets, Karel, and Bert Hogenkamp, eds. Film and the First World War. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995.

Hammond, Michael. The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War (1914–1918). Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2006.

Kelly, Andrew. Cinema and the Great War. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Paris, Michael, ed. The First World War and Popular Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

Thompson, Kristin. Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Market. London: British Film Institute, 1985.

Williams, Michael. Ivor Novello: A Screen Idol. London: British Film Institute, 2003.

Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Wood, Richard, ed. Film and Propaganda in America: A Documentary History. Vol. 1: World War One. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990.

Michael Williams