MOTION PICTURES

By 1920, although color and synchronized sound technology were not yet in use, filmmaking and moviegoing in the United States already closely resembled twenty-first century practices. But nothing about the early history of the medium made these practices inevitable. To paraphrase Charles Musser in his The Emergence of Cinema (1990), the cinema was not so much invented as it emerged, at the end of the nineteenth century, from a convergence of multiple fields of image production and spectatorship—photography, vaudeville theater, and so forth—due to the efforts of a diverse group of American and European entrepreneurs.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MEDIUM

Still photography was not successfully tested in France until 1839, but audiences had been viewing demonstrations of large images reflected by mirrors, under the aegis of magic or science, at least since the seventeenth century and probably for centuries prior. As the Enlightenment and the industrial age brought new technologies into general public use, shadow and projector displays like the magic lantern, a lamp that used flame and lenses to project images drawn onto glass slides, became popular entertainments. Many middle-class children owned optical toys such as flip-books and zoetropes, which produced the illusion of movement by use of incremental drawings flashed rapidly one at a time, as in a hand-drawn animated cartoon. By the end of the nineteenth century, "slip slides" (magic lantern slides with moving parts), slide series that showed scenes changing over time, and other devices to suggest movement and change entertained thousands in America's urban vaudeville houses. Though not projected, other public entertainments like panoramas and dioramas nevertheless anticipated the cinema's ability to bring faraway places closer by re-creating cities and exotic locales in meticulous detail and even simulating motion within these virtual spaces. During the same period, curious crowds were willing to pay small fees to see demonstrations of new inventions like the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, and even electric lighting.

Motion pictures began life as one more invention that people bought tickets to see. The principle of motion pictures was developed for more or less scientific purposes by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 and Étienne-Jules Marey in 1879, English and French respectively, who used serial photographs and long exposures to study the motion of animals and people. In the United States, Thomas A. Edison (1847–1931) remarked, in 1888, that he was developing an invention that "does for the Eye what the phonograph"—which Edison had also invented—"does for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion." Edison, who owned an "invention factory" in Menlo Park, New Jersey, was practiced in marketing his inventions as amusements. After meeting both Muybridge and Marey to discuss the practical problems of capturing and representing movement and after taking notes on Muybridge's primitive Zoopraxiscope projector, Edison began work on his own moving picture camera in earnest.

The first camera concocted by Edison's lab was the Kinetograph, overseen by W. K. Laurie Dickson in 1892. After considering other storage options, Dickson recorded images on the strips of photosensitive celluloid developed by the Eastman Company for their hundred-exposure Kodak cameras, invented in 1890. The resulting films, less than a minute long and featuring both performances (women dancing) and mundane activities (a sneeze), were viewed on a Kinetoscope, a peephole viewer marketed for use in penny arcades in 1894. At the same time, Louis and Auguste Lumière were exploiting their own moving picture camera, the Cinématographe, which doubled as a projector. They screened their fifty-second films before an audience for the first time in Paris on 28 December 1895. The Kinetograph and Cinématographe cameras worked on the same principle: each exposed photographic stock to light by intermittently advancing the film through a "gate," which held it still for approximately one-eighteenth of a second (subject to wide variability, as most cameras were hand-cranked) as a shutter exposed a single frame. Other companies and individuals invented variations of cameras and viewing devices at the same time, igniting the litigious wrath of the Edison Company. A rival arcade viewer called the Mutoscope—which Dickson secretly codeveloped in 1894—avoided infringing on Edison's Kinetoscope patent by using individual flip-cards rather than a filmstrip.

While peephole viewers were popular at first, they were not very lucrative and quickly exhausted their market. Edison and his rivals soon developed projectors like the Lumières' that could display films for large audiences. On 23 April 1896, Edison's Vitascope projector (invented by C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat and handled by a Kinetoscope marketing company, Raff and Gammon) premiered at Koster and Bial's vaudeville theater in New York City to rave reviews. By that time so many moving picture machines had appeared—including the Cinématographe, Robert Paul's Theatrograph in England, and numerous American rivals—that the public had trouble keeping the names straight. A famous scene from chapter 7 of Frank Norris's novel McTeague (1896, published 1899) inaccurately refers to the projector that entertains McTeague and his fiancée as the "Kinetograph"; whether this mistake may be attributed to the theater in the novel or to Norris himself may never be known. But Norris does give an excellent sense of what watching the first projected films was like: after brief vaudeville acts that include acrobats, comedians, and singers, Norris's characters watch a program of short films with subjects as varied as those of the live show, and they comment loudly to one another on the astonishingly lifelike effect.

THE FIRST FILMS

What did the first spectators see? As McTeague attests, they did not see feature-length films. The Vitascope's sprocket system pulled the film so taut that reels much longer than fifty feet—around a minute of running time—would snap. (A system that reduced projection stress by allowing slack to the film, the Latham Loop, was developed independently in 1895 but was not immediately incorporated into the Kinetograph or the Vitascope.) Thus the earliest shows consisted of multiple short films sold in "programs." Stylistically, the films seem merely crude in the early twenty-first century. Due to the length limitation, editing was rarely considered, and even after 1897, when this limitation was overcome, filmmakers tended to minimize the number of discrete shots per film. Action was filmed from a single camera position, usually far enough from the performers to display them from head to toe, and performers were not shy about acknowledging the camera's presence. If close-ups were used, they picked out objects, people, and body parts (such as scandalously revealed female ankles) not to emphasize their significance within a story as they do in the early twenty-first century but simply to offer audiences the pleasure of looking at things and people—often performing such private activities as kissing, getting drunk, or arguing—in the strange new context of flickering images displayed before a large public. Though color cinematography was not possible, filmmakers occasionally had prints individually hand tinted, frame by frame, in multiple colors, but this practice required so much time and labor that it was limited to special subjects or particularly spectacular scenes. In 1904 Sigmund Lubin began chemically dyeing his films in solid colors that changed with each shot, and this tinting process soon caught on across the industry as a means of distinguishing daytime from nighttime scenes, establishing mood, and creating other expressive effects.

The subject matter of the first films also depended in part on the state of the technology. While the small, light Cinématographe was well suited to "documentary" films shot in the streets and homes of Paris, Edison's Kinetograph was heavy and bulky, and so the company invited performers—boxers, vaudeville players, cockfight handlers, and the like—to be filmed in a shed at Menlo Park dubbed the Black Maria. Genres developed that mirrored contemporary mass cultural forms: "actualities," which were views of places and people of interest (in keeping with the illustrated travelogues popular with social clubs); slapstick comedy scenes; bits from plays; "bad boy" films; chase films; and trick films. Though technically silent (Edison had quickly abandoned as impractical his plan to synchronize sound to the moving image), films were rarely projected without musical accompaniment or spoken commentary. The more fastidious projectionists also offered interpretive frameworks to their audiences by arranging unconnected short films into themed programs (political humor, railroad subjects, and so forth).

Crude as they may seem now, these huge projected images of diverse activities, as vibrant as life but uncannily distant and devoid of color, impressed the press and public tremendously. It is doubtful that spectators dove for cover as they watched railroad engines rush toward the camera, as Parisians supposedly did when the Lumières screened Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in 1895. The film historian Tom Gunning has argued that, in this era of rapid and well-publicized technological change, viewers were unlikely to have been fooled into mistaking films for reality, but they did love to be astonished by the new machines that seemed to multiply daily. The first audiences consisted of a mélange of city dwellers: factory and sweatshop laborers, recent immigrants with no knowledge of English, and middle- and upper-class seekers of novel forms of amusement. The early cinema, which Gunning has called "the cinema of attractions," satisfied an increasing need for stimulus in the urban population, instilled in them by their fast-paced and often dangerous lives. As they watched these programs, viewers behaved as if they were at a fairground or a street corner. They talked loudly about the films and allowed their eyes and ears to wander from the screen to other patrons, other events taking place in the exhibition space, the lecturer, and the projector itself, which was initially the central attraction of any film show. Indeed, the brevity and diversity of the films themselves did not support the sustained attention that characterizes film spectatorship in the early twenty-first century; within a few years, the film industry would begin to see spectators' inattentive and boisterous behavior as a threat to the future of their enterprise.

STRUGGLES OVER FILMS AND THEIR EXHIBITION

During their "novelty" phase (1894–1898), moving pictures faced an uncertain future. Producers scrambled for content, trying everything from boxing matches like the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight of 1897 to films about the Spanish-American War of 1898—a conflict that Musser speculates might have saved the film industry from running out of filmable material. The two major producers of films in the United States during this time were Edison and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, which Dickson founded upon quitting Menlo Park. AM&B's Biograph projector (invented in 1896) was superior to the Vitascope and set off a furious patent war between the companies. Producers both domestic (American Vitagraph, Selig Polyscope) and foreign (Georges Méliès's Star Films, Pathé Frères) made steady headway into a market that constantly needed new films. Edison and Biograph eventually gave up competing with each other and their biggest rivals and, with Biograph's reluctant consent, formed the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) on 18 December 1908 to pool patents and protect themselves against competition; the struggling producers not invited to join the MPPC referred to it as "the Trust" with good reason. The ten companies that comprised the MPPC were the best capitalized in the industry, they had the highest production values, and they controlled the distribution of their highly desirable films (as well as they could, at least, in a business overwhelmed by bootlegging and illegal exchanges of licensed for unlicensed films). All the Trust lacked was control over exhibition, and even the exhibitors were largely at the mercy of their production schedules—for the moment.

The film industry as a whole suffered during this period from public relations problems due to both film content and exhibition circumstances. The MPPC producers wanted to court a middle-class audience to expand their market, but this was not easy considering the shocking content of the films: during the medium's first decade a viewer might see trains ramming into one another, "Turks" being decapitated and their heads reattaching themselves, a respectable family blown to bits by a car crash, and burlesque dancers featured in "blue" films, all in a single film program. Religious and political leaders and social reformers worried publicly about both the content of films and the venues that screened them. At first films were shown in urban vaudeville theaters and other multiuse venues. Itinerant exhibitors made a living taking films to towns and rural areas and screening them at fairs, churches, and town halls. But by 1905 a growing number of entertainment entrepreneurs, notably Marcus Loew and Carl Laemmle, had erected highly successful nickel-and-dime theaters or "nickelodeons" dedicated to continuous film shows. These nickelodeons soon popped up in working-class hubs and middle-class neighborhoods and shopping districts all over the United States; their primary patrons included factory and sweatshop laborers, female shoppers, mothers with children to entertain, and children old enough to entertain themselves. How, asked the reformers, would the uneducated, impressionable, and immigrant viewers learn to respect American mores and laws if their favorite form of entertainment supplied little else but shocks and debauchery?

To make matters worse, the nickelodeons themselves seemed dens of iniquity—darkened, anonymous spaces regularly attended by unchaperoned working women. On Christmas Eve in 1908, the mayor of New York ordered the city's theaters closed on grounds of public indecency. The message was clear: producers and exhibitors would have to work harder and faster to make movies a respectable entertainment or cede control of their own business to city legislators and external censors.

TELLING STORIES ON FILM

The story film would prove crucial to the producers' race for respectability. Edwin S. Porter, a New York projectionist, began directing films for the Edison Company in 1901. Porter initially made single-shot slapstick films but learned, from watching the films of the French magician Georges Méliès (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), how to thrill audiences with cinematic tricks, such as double exposures and the "transformation" of objects accomplished by stopping and restarting the camera. Porter's films, like most story films of the time, emphasized broad physical humor and relied on the audience's knowledge of such familiar material as current events, fairy tales, and biblical tales. But Porter learned another trick from Méliès that helped change the way that American producers thought about storytelling: how to overlap discrete shots by beginning an action in one shot (for example, a character leaving a room) and completing it in the next (the same character arriving at another character's house). This trick made it possible to string together shots of different locations into a relatively lengthy story—a full twelve-minute reel or even more—without leaving the audience wondering what the shot changes meant, how much time had elapsed between shots, and so forth. By 1903, with the release of Porter's The Great Train Robbery following the great successes of his Jack and the Beanstalk and Life of an American Fireman (both 1902), it was becoming clear that the story film would be key to the producers' future success. Porter was proving that a well-told story could not only interest an audience but also could give it a dramatic thrill that depended on the story itself and not on the experience of seeing photographs move, which had by then lost its novelty.

The broad pantomime and slapstick plots of many early story films held little attraction for the middle class, which was more interested in literature and plays. Hoping to cultivate this lucrative market, American Vitagraph and several foreign concerns produced "quality" films, beginning with the American release in 1909 of a film by the French producer Film d'Art called La Mort du duc de Guise. These films condensed Shakespeare plays, poetry, opera plots, and biblical or quasi-biblical stories down to a few reels, sported opulent sets, and used restrained acting styles at a time when comedies dominated American film. According to their marketers, these films offered "uplift," education, even the possibility of Americanization to a heterogeneous film audience. The most complex story films, however, seemed incapable of getting their narratives across. Producers had distributed their films with filmed "intertitles"—full-screen cards that provided exposition and dialogue—since 1904, but this innovation did not automatically clarify every story. Critics in the trade press speculated about the reasons for this difficulty, blaming inadequate acting, poor plots, bad camera placement, and a myriad of other infractions, but they could not agree on how producers should proceed.

More than any other individual, D. W. Griffith, a stage actor who began directing for Biograph in 1908, helped the industry to streamline its storytelling tactics. Capitalizing on the methods of Méliès, Porter, the producer-director Alice Guy Blaché, and their imitators, Griffith compiled a number of extant cinematic techniques, such as close-ups and rudimentary cause- and-effect editing, for use in his tales of domestic and ethical crisis. Rather than letting the performers pantomime all the important story information to a camera standing four yards away, Griffith varied his framings and included a much higher number of shots per film than any of his rivals. Together these stratagems implied to the viewer an omniscient narrator, akin to the narrator of a Victorian novel, commenting on the action, revealing characters' thoughts, and focusing on key story elements. Like his hero, Charles Dickens, Griffith used skillful editing to alternate between simultaneous events in different places, as in his popular race-to-the-rescue films The Lonely Villa (1909) and The Lonedale Operator (1911).

Griffith's Biograph films were so popular with the press and with audiences that other directors incorporated Griffith's techniques and focused more of their energies on story films. They also took more risks in hopes of stumbling upon a formula that would overtake the industry. The remarkable success of a few imported films—including the French film Queen Elizabeth (1912), starring the international stage idol Sarah Bernhardt, and two Italian historical epics, Quo Vadis? (1913) and Cabiria (1914)—proved that American audiences would sit through films running one hour, two hours, or even longer. Small-time entrepreneurs like Chicago's Carl Laemmle—who began with a single nickelodeon theater and founded a small distribution company—jumped into production themselves, taking chances on longer films and new forms of publicity that the MPPC companies refused to attempt and soon overtaking the Trust producers in popularity. Perhaps these upstarts' most crucial innovation was to capitalize on the popularity of certain actors. By 1908 viewers tended to choose films based on their brand names. This practice served Biograph well during 1908 to 1913, when Griffith (anonymously) directed nearly all of the more than four hundred films Biograph produced. As Griffith and others focused on character psychology and used close-ups to register actors' facial reactions, viewers became curious about actors and began favoring a few over the rest. The "Biograph Girl," Florence Lawrence, became an attraction in her own right in 1909, and by 1910 Laemmle had lured her to his IMP company and trumpeted her arrival with a massive publicity stunt.

MOTION PICTURES BECOME BIG BUSINESS

Like the proliferation of story films, the new focus on actors was not an obvious development but a calculated strategy. Initially such actors as Lawrence, Mary Pickford, Maurice Costello, Florence Turner, Francis X. Bushman, and Mabel Normand and comedian John Bunny were what Richard de Cordova calls "picture personalities"—that is, figures known only for their screen personae, which tended to carry over from picture to picture. Theda Bara, one of the screen's first sex symbols (A Fool There Was, 1915), was also one of the first actors for whom a studio fabricated a biography specifically for public consumption. No longer simply a picture personality, she was one of the first movie stars—someone whose private life fascinated the fans as much as her on-screen presence. The British comedian Charlie Chaplin made his star name into a franchise by 1915, proving his economic clout and his skill as a director for Mutual. By 1920 Chaplin, Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, the western director and star William S. Hart, and the comedian-directors Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Buster Keaton were among the richest and most famous people in the world. Their tremendous successes prompted Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks, and Griffith to quit their studio connections and cofound United Artists, through which they would independently produce and distribute their own features.

Star actors and directors also accelerated the development of some of the most popular early feature genres: the adventure film, the western, the domestic melodrama, and the slapstick comedy. One leader in the domestic melodrama genre was Famous Players–Lasky, which later merged with its distributor Paramount. Its chief director, Cecil B. De Mille, directed many films (The Cheat, 1915; Why Change Your Wife? 1920) that irritated social reformers by glamorizing sexual innuendo and "sin." But the sophisticated immorality of De Mille's characters and his "artistic" arrangement of shadows and light—dubbed "Rembrandt" lighting by appreciative critics—appealed to a young middle-class audience that cared little about the reformist agenda; in any event, De Mille always punished iniquity in the final reel. Mack Sennett, a Biograph employee who wrote scripts for Griffith, formed the Keystone Company in 1912 and soon helped transform the least respectable of early genres, slapstick, into an art of satire and parody, free from the era's atmosphere of social repression. Chaplin and Arbuckle both began their careers at Keystone; like Chaplin, Arbuckle became so popular that he founded his own production company and gave Keaton his first film roles.

A mere seven years after the Trust was formed, the upstart companies the Trust had shut out had rebuilt the industry in their own image. Because many of them began as film exhibitors, these "unlicensed" producer-distributors controlled all three of the industry's economic centers, an arrangement known as "vertical integration." Laemmle's IMP company, for example, began with a single theater in Chicago in 1906, grew into a theater chain, joined with a multi-producer combine that was later reorganized as the Universal Film Manufacturing company (1912), and released wildly popular films—such as the sensationalist white-slavery "exposé" Traffic in Souls (1913)—under the Universal trademark; their combined economic strength, as producers, distributors, and exhibitors, helped place Laemmle and Universal in a dominant position in the industry. Unable to acquire theaters of their own in a market dominated by multicity theater chains—controlled by "independents" like William Fox, Lasky, and Loew's (later to become the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)—the Trust companies withered. A 1912 antitrust suit leveled at the MPPC producers sounded their early death knell, and by 1918 they had all but disappeared.

Griffith contributed to the unraveling of the Trust when he left Biograph in 1913 (a move that practically killed the company on the spot) and filmed The Birth of a Nation (1915) independently, distributing it through Mutual. By this time multi-reel features had begun to enter the market but were still resisted, primarily because most theaters seated patrons continuously during shows and late arrivals could more easily catch up with the plot of a two-reel film than one that ran four reels or more. But Birth proved that big American films had a consistent market and could garner "Broadway" ticket prices of a dollar or more. Nearly three hours long, it spanned the Civil War and the Reconstruction era and treated psychological, familial, and historical crises. It did not change the industry all by itself, but it cemented the motion picture's potential for grand success (it grossed $15 million in five years of continuous bookings), social import, sophistication and subtlety of storytelling, and controversy.

The studios—which also included the Fox Film Company and Samuel Goldwyn—grew quickly thanks to their innovations in organizing and overseeing multi-film production. Thomas Ince—a director whose westerns for the Bison "101" company were so popular that he became the subject of a multi-studio bidding war—helped introduce to filmmaking what Janet Staiger calls the "central producer" system. To maximize production, Ince implemented a division of labor—full shooting scripts containing shot breakdowns; directors who managed the photography phase and executed the script's shot-by-shot instructions; and technicians subdivided into crews concerned solely with camera, costumes, staging, lighting, editing, and so on. This system rationalized and streamlined the filmmaking process. In 1910 the industry began to take another big step, this time a geographical one. Biograph and other companies slowly migrated from New York, Chicago, and other eastern cities to southern California in order to capitalize on the three hundred–plus days of sunshine per year and highly varied locales for shooting outdoors; by 1920 the word "Hollywood" was becoming synonymous with the movies and the glamour they represented.

In 1920, with the era of sound film still six years away, Hollywood was the most powerful film industry in the world, a circumstance not entirely due to sheer perseverance or marketing brilliance. World War I had decimated the Italian, French, and German industries—once powerful exporters to the American market (and still major influences on American storytelling and visual style)—and allowed Hollywood producer-distributors to get a toehold in overseas markets that desperately needed new films to distribute. By this time motion pictures were central to the lives of Americans of all classes and ages, and American films and exhibition practices dominated movie houses throughout western Europe as well. As early as 1910 some American exhibitors dressed up their theaters with opulent entryways, velvet interiors, and uniformed ushers. By the end of the decade these "picture palaces" were the norm, giving patrons the opportunity to experience the trappings of Hollywood glamour firsthand while watching its representatives enact it on the screen. But even the glamour had an American twist. Most studio "moguls" and many of the biggest stars began as poor immigrants, many of them Jewish, and their life stories held the rags-to-riches appeal of some of the country's greatest success stories in production and commerce. Many of the most popular films followed characters on a similar path from the gutter to happiness and success and were filled with luxury and decadence and humor that allowed the lion's share of patrons to ignore their own hardships for a few hours and fantasize about partaking of the abundance that eluded them in everyday life.

see alsoThe Birth of a Nation; Photography; Science and Technology; Theater

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. Directed by Louis Lumière. Lumière Frères, 1895.

The Birth of a Nation. Directed by D. W. Griffith. 1915.

Cabiria. Directed by Giovanni Pastrone; performer Letizia Quaranta. Itala Film Company, 1914.

The Cheat. Directed by Cecil B. De Mille; performers Sessue Hayakawa, Fannie Ward, and Jack Dean. Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, 1915.

A Fool There Was. Directed by Frank Powell; performer Theda Bara. William Fox Vaudeville Company, 1915.

The Great Train Robbery. Directed by Edwin S. Porter; performers Justus Barnes and Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson. Edison, 1903.

The Lonedale Operator. Directed by D. W. Griffith; performer Blanche Sweet. Biograph, 1911.

La Mort du duc de Guise, [The death of the duc de Guise]. Directed by Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes. Film d'Art, 1909.

Queen Elizabeth. Directed by Louis Mercanton and Henri Desfontaines; performer Sarah Bernhardt. L'Histrionic Film, 1912.

The Tramp. Directed by Charles Chaplin; performers Charlie Chaplin and Edna Purviance. Essenay, 1915.

The Trip to the Moon. Directed by Georges Méliès. Star Film, 1902.

Secondary Works

Balio, Tino, ed. The American Film Industry. Rev. ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema 1907–1915. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd ed. New York and London: Norton, 1996.

De Cordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Elsaesser, Thomas, and Adam Barker, eds. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: British Film Institute, 1990.

Gomery, Douglas. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Gunning, Tom. "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator." In Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams, pp. 114–133. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde." Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (1986): 63–70.

Keil, Charlie. Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.

Koszarski, Richard. An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928. New York: Scribners, 1990.

Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Paul Young