Louis Feuillade often used depth to give Parisian locales mysteriously haunting qualities. The crime thriller Fan-tomas allowed him to display surprising and ingenious uses of depth on location (3.41, 3.42) and in the vast sets he built at Gaumont Studios (3.43).
For further examples, compare the European-style depth staging in 3.4, 3.7-3.9, and 3.22-3.26 with the
American propensity to edit together shots of figures in a shallow playing space in 3.31-3.37 and 3.44-3.46.
During the early 1920s, the continuity system was increasingly adopted in Europe as well, and depth staging in long-held shots was becoming a rare option. Such shots would become more common in the 1930s, when sound filming encouraged them.
3.41 Fantomas: as Inspector Juve and his sidekick Fandor investigate a dockside, Fantomas's gang pop up behind them and fire.
3.42 Inspector Juve awaits his prey, who approaches, visible through the bars of the gate.
3.43 At the theater, Lady Beltham turns to leave, but we still glimpse the actor taking his bow far behind her.
3.44-3.46 Light from a single, powerful spotlight offscreen left creates a dramatic silhouette on a translucent wall after the villain is shot in The Cheat.
And the early 1920s, large film studios boasted a great array of different types of lamps for every purpose.
As feature films became standardized, Hollywood filmmakers established firmer guidelines for creating intelligible plots. These guidelines have changed little since then. Hollywood plots consist of clear chains of causes and effects, and most of these involve character psychology (as opposed to social or natural forces). Each major character is given a set of comprehensible, consistent traits. The Hollywood protagonist is typically goal-oriented, trying to achieve success in work, sports, or some other activity. The hero’s goal conflicts with the desires of other characters, creating a struggle that is resolved only at the end—which is typically a happy one. Hollywood films usually intensify interest by presenting two interdependent plot lines. Almost inevitably one of these involves romance, which gets woven in with the protagonist’s quest to achieve a goal.
3.47 The figure of Christ superimposed on a battlefield in the pacifist drama Civilization.
3.48 The southern son’s return home is filmed at an oblique angle so that the doorway conceals his mother and sister as they embrace him in The Birth of a Nation. Such understatement enhances the emotional power of the moment.
The plot also arouses suspense through deadlines, escalating conflicts, and last-minute rescues. These principles of storytelling have contributed to the enduring international success of American films.
During this period, the big Hollywood firms grew enormously. Feature-length films (running on average about 75 minutes) dominated exhibition by 1915. The studios competed to sign up the most popular actors to longterm contracts. Some stars, like Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, were making thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars a week by the end of the decade. Studios also bought the rights to many famous literary works and adapted them as vehicles for their stars.
The huge expansion of American production required many directors. Some of these had begun working earlier, but a younger generation entered the cinema at this time.
Thomas H. Ince and D. W. Griffith Thomas H. Ince had started by directing many short films in the early 1910s, but he also became a producer in the ranks of the independents. As the decade progressed, he focused more on producing. Today he is remembered primarily for having contributed to the move toward efficiency in studio filmmaking, particularly the use of the continuity script to control production. He still directed occasionally, however. His 1916 Civilization (codirected with Raymond B. West and Reginald Barker) is notable as one of a number of pacifist films made in the years before America entered World War I. The story takes place in a mythical kingdom ruled by a warmongering king. Christ enters the resurrected body of a young pacifist who died in battle and converts the king with a message of peace (3.47). This was Ince’s last directorial effort, however, and he concentrated on producing—including most of the Westerns of William S. Hart—until his death in 1924.
In 1913, D. W. Griffith left the Biograph Company, where he had made over four hundred short films since 1908. Biograph was reluctant to allow Griffith to make films longer than two reels. Despite the firm’s resistance, he completed a four-reel historical epic, Judith of Bethu-lia (1913), in the wake of the success of the Italian import Quo Vadis?, but it was his last film for Biograph. During 1914, he made four feature films for Mutual, the independent distribution firm he managed; among these, The Avenging Conscience was an imaginative film that employed fantasy scenes inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” and poem “Annabel Lee.”
That same year, however, he was at work on a far more ambitious project. Independently financed from various sources, the twelve-reel The Birth of a Nation told an epic tale of the American Civil War by centering on two families who befriend each other but are on opposite sides in the conflict. During Reconstruction, Stoneman, Leader of the House and the head of the northern family, pushes through legislation that gives rights to freed slaves, while the elder son of the southern family helps start the Ku Klux Klan in response to outrages committed in his town. Using many actors from his Biograph days, Griffith created subtle portrayals of the two families. His regular cinematographer, Billy Bitzer, designed shots ranging from epic views of battles to intimate details of the characters’ lives (3.48). Later scenes expanded Griffith’s technique of intercutting for last-minute rescue situations. The Klan races to save the southern family, trapped in a cabin by attacking blacks, and to free the heroine from the grip of the villainous mulatto leader, who threatens her virtue (3.49). Accompanied by a special orchestral score Griffith had commissioned, the film previewed in Los Angeles and San Francisco and then opened in New York and Boston early in 1915. It played in large legitimate theaters at high prices, was enormously successful, and brought a new respectability to the movies.
3.49 Griffith mounted his camera on a car to create fast tracking shots before the galloping Klan members in the climactic rescue sequence.
Not surprisingly, given its bigoted account of African Americans’ role in southern history, The Birth of a Nation also aroused heated controversy. Many editorials in white - and black-owned newspapers alike denounced its racism. The film was based on a novel, The Clansman, by a well-known racist author, Thomas Dixon. Although Griffith had toned down the worst excesses of the novel in favor of a concentration on the white families, many commentators treated the film as primarily a creation of Dixon. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been founded in 1909, and the struggle for civil rights was under way by the time the film appeared. Realizing that the artistic qualities of Birth made it all the more effective as racist propaganda, NAACP officials pressured the censorship boards in New York and Boston to cut the most offensive scenes or to ban the film outright. (Ironically, segregation meant that these NAACP members could not even attend the film in theaters but had to see it at a screening arranged for them.) Supporters of the film won out, however, and The Birth of a Nation was exhibited all over the country. Black leaders realized the desirability of African American-produced films to counter such racism, but lack of funding delayed the implementation of this idea. Only somewhat later would a few black filmmakers emerge (see Chapter 7).
In his next film, Griffith tried to outdo himself. Intolerance, released in 1916, was even longer (fourteen reels, or roughly three and a half hours). Griffith used an abstract theme, the idea of intolerance through the ages, to link four separate stories set in different historical epochs: the fall of Babylon, the last part of Christ’s life, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France, and a tale of a labor strike and gangster activity in modern-day America. To stress the unchanging nature of intolerance, Griffith intercut these stories rather than telling them one after the other. Through most of the film, intertitles and an allegorical figure of a woman rocking a cradle announce the shifts from one story to the next. In the final section, however, as four separate rescues are attempted, Griffith suddenly cut among them without such signals. The result is a daring experiment in the use of editing to join disparate spaces and times (3.50, 3.51). Intolerance was also innovative in its cinematography, as when Bitzer mounted the camera on a movable elevator to create swooping movements over the huge set of the Babylonian court.
Intolerance was not as successful as The Birth of a Nation, and Griffith’s subsequent features of the 1910s were less experimental. Griffith went on location to film war footage for Hearts of the World (1918), a story set in a French village during World War I. He made delightful country romances with A Romance of Happy Valley and True Heart Susie (both 1919) and a drama that used unusual hazy soft-focus cinematography, Broken Blossoms (1919).
Griffith was the most famous director of this era. He quickly came to be credited with innovating most of the major film techniques—something he encouraged in publicizing himself. Some modern historians have treated The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance as almost the only important American films of this period. Without detracting from Griffith’s prestige, however, we should realize that many excellent filmmakers worked during this era, some of whose work is only beginning to be explored (see “Notes and Queries” at the end of this chapter).
A New Generation of Directors Griffith managed to keep considerable control over his productions, despite the growing supervision of the studio producers. Other directors who began working in this era also became powerful creative figures. In 1914, Maurice Tourneur emigrated from France and became known as a distinctive filmmaker with a strong sense of pictorial beauty. One of his first American films, The Wishing Ring (1914), was subtitled “An Idyll of Old England.” It is a fanciful story of a poor girl who naively believes that a ring a gypsy has given her is magical. She tries to use it to reconcile a local earl and his estranged son and does so simply by befriending both. Tourneur managed to create a remarkable atmosphere of a rustic English village, even though the entire film was made in New Jersey. Tourneur was one of the many filmmakers testing the expressive possibilities of the film medium during this era. In 1918, he experimented with using modernist theatrical set design in The Blue Bird and Prunella, though these were less popular than most of his films of the 1910s. He also made some highly intelligent
3.50, 3.51 In Intolerance, Griffith boldly cut directly from galloping chariots in the Babylonian story to a speeding train in the modern story.
3.52, left Tourneur used a tent opening to create a dynamic composition for a dramatic moment in The Last of the Mohicans.
3.53, right Keystone comedies often parodied conventional melodramas, as when villain Ford Sterling threatens to saw Mabel Normand in half in Mabel’s Awful Mistake (1913, Mack Sennett). The white streaks at the sides are nitrate deterioration.
Literary adaptations, including Victory (1919, from Joseph Conrad’s novel) and The Last of the Mohicans (1920, by James Fenimore Cooper). The latter, often considered his finest film, fully displays Tourneur’s visual style, including his characteristic use of foreground shapes silhouetted against a landscape, often framed in a cave or doorway (3.52). During the 1920s, Tourneur increasingly had trouble retaining control over his productions as the studio system grew, and he returned to Europe in 1926.
Unlike Tourneur, Cecil B. De Mille survived within the studio system and managed to control many of his own productions throughout a long and prolific career. De Mille is often thought of today primarily for his historical epics of the sound era, but during his early career, he made many innovative films in various genres. The Cheat and several other pictures he made in 1915 were influential in popularizing directional, selective lighting (see 3.44-3.46). De Mille made a number of unpretentious, well-acted period films during the mid-1910s, including The Warrens of Virginia (1915) and The Girl of the Golden West (1916). In 1918, he made Male and Female, adapted from J. M. Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton and starring Gloria Swanson. The enormous success of this film led De Mille to concentrate on romantic comedies, often set in sophisticated society. His films of the 1920s became more extravagant, exploiting elaborate sets and fashionable costumes.
Other major Hollywood directors also began their careers in the 1910s. Actor Raoul Walsh, who had directed several two-reel films, made an impressive feature debut in 1915 with Regeneration, a realistic story set in a slum milieu. John Ford began making low-budget Westerns in 1917 and directed dozens of them over the next few years. Unfortunately, nearly all are lost, but two surviving films, Straight Shooting (1917) and Hell Bent (1918), indicate that Ford had a rare feeling for landscape and a flexible understanding of the continuity system from the beginning.
Slapstick Comedies and Westerns Some of the most popular directors and stars of this era were associated with the genre of slapstick comedy. Once feature films were standardized, they were typically shown on a program that included shorts, such as comedies, newsreels, and brief dramas. Among the most successful shorts were the films of producer-director Mack Sennett. Sennett headed the Keystone company, which specialized in slapstick comedy. Sennett used a great deal of fast action, including chases with the bumbling “Keystone Kops.” His small stable of comic stars, who often directed their own pictures, included Charlie Chaplin, Ben Turpin, and Mabel Normand (3.53).
Chaplin, an English music-hall performer, became an international star with Keystone, going on to direct his own films at Essanay, Mutual, and First National
3.54 In His New]ob (1915, Essanay, Charles Chaplin), Chaplin provided a look behind the scenes of comic filmmaking at the “Lockstone" film company, a reference to his beginnings at Keystone.
3.55 The City Slicker (1918) displays Harold Lloyd’s typical persona, a brash young fellow in spectacles and a straw hat.
3.56 The protagonist of Hell’s Hinges (1916, William S. Hart and Charles Swickard) epitomizes Hart’s “good-badman" character, as he reads the Bible given to him by the heroine—with a bottle of whiskey at his elbow.
Over the course of the 1910s (3.54). Chaplin’s style was notable for his comically inappropriate use of objects, as in The Pawnshop (1916), where he gauges the value of a clock by listening to its ticking with a stethoscope. His dexterity led to many elaborately choreographed fights, chases, and mix-ups, such as the breakneck shenanigans on roller skates in The Rink (1916). In a few of his films, such as The Vagabond (1916) and The Immigrant, Chaplin also introduced an element of pathos unknown in slapstick films. Chaplin’s “Little Tramp,” with his bowler, cane, and oversized shoes, was soon one of the most widely recognized figures in the world.
One of Sennett’s rivals was Hal Roach, who produced films with the young Harold Lloyd. Although Lloyd’s initial series character, “Lonesome Luke,” was basically an imitation of Chaplin, he soon donned a pair of dark-rimmed glasses and developed his own persona (3.55). Other comics of the period included Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and his sidekick Buster Keaton, who would come into his own as a star in the 1920s.
The Western also continued to be popular during the 1910s. William S. Hart, one of its most prominent stars, had been a stage actor and did not enter films until he was nearly fifty. His age, plus his long, lean face, allowed him to play weather-beaten, world-weary roles. His characters were often criminals or men with shady pasts; the plots frequently involved his redemption by love. As a result, Hart’s persona became known as the “good-badman,” an approach taken up by many subsequent Western stars (3.56). His worn clothing and other realistic touches gave Hart’s Westerns a sense of historical authenticity, despite their often conventional plots.
Another cowboy star of this period was in many ways Hart’s opposite. Tom Mix came out of a background of rodeos and Wild West shows. His films were less realistic than Hart’s and emphasized fast action, fancy riding, and stunts. After years of making low-budget shorts for Selig, Mix moved to Fox in 1917 and soon became the most popular cowboy star of the late silent era.
One event at the end of this decade indicates the importance that major stars and directors had assumed by this time. In 1919, three of the most popular actors—Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charles Chaplin—joined the leading director D. W. Griffith in establishing a new firm, United Artists. This was a prestigious distribution company, dealing only in films that these four produced independently. (Later, other independent producers and stars, such as Samuel Goldwyn and Buster Keaton, also distributed through United Artists.) Although Griffith had to drop out a few years later, the new firm did give some stars and producers a high degree of control that was quite unlike the experiences of filmmakers working for the big studios. We shall see some of its results in Chapter 7.
The development of the Hollywood studio system during the 1910s and the accompanying American takeover of world film markets were among the most influential changes in cinema history. The events of these years defined standard commercial filmmaking. Some of the U. S. companies that began in this era are still making films. The division of labor into specialized tasks has continued to the present day. The star system is still one of the primary means of appealing to audiences, and directors continue to coordinate the process
3.57 In The Artist’s Dream (1913), the animated dog is painted onto a background setting printed on a series of sheets of paper.
3.58 A frame from Bobby Bumps and His Goatmobile (1917), in which the moving figures are drawn on transparent celluloid sheets placed over a single painting of the setting.
3.59 An Edison cartoon of 1915, Cartoons in the Hotel, animated by Barre. The head of the cow has been “slashed" off its body, which remains static, while separate drawings allow the head to move.
Of filmmaking. The basic principles of the classical Hollywood style of filmmaking have changed remarkably little. For better or worse, during this era, Hollywood and the movies became almost synonymous for many audiences around the world.
Streamlining American Animation
In the same manner that the labor involved in live-action filmmaking was being divided, animated filmmaking was also becoming standardized within the American industry. Several filmmakers realized that cartoons could be made more economically and quickly if the work could be broken down on an assembly-line system. The main animator could design and supervise the work while subsidiary workers drew most of the pictures needed for the film’s movement. In addition, during the 1910s, technical innovations speeded up the process of animation: the mechanical printing of background settings, the use of transparent cels, and the slash technique of drawing action.
Early animators like Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay worked by making huge numbers of drawings (see Chapter 2). McCay had an assistant to trace the unmoving background settings onto sheets of paper. In 1913, John Randolph Bray devised a method of mechanizing the process of animation: he printed the same background on many sheets of paper, then animated painted shapes on top of that background to create The Artist’s Dream (3.57).
In December 1914, Bray started his own animation studio, hiring a young man named Earl Hurd. That same month, Hurd applied for a patent on the idea of drawing the moving figures in animated cartoons on sheets of transparent celluloid. (The individual sheets are called cels, giving rise to the term cel animation.) This technique meant that each moving portion could be redrawn bit by bit on separate cels while the background remained constant. Hurd’s “Bobby Bumps” series were among the most popular cartoons of the decade (3.58).
During this same period, Raoul Barre developed the slash system of animation. A figure would be drawn on paper, and then the portion of the body that moved would be cut away and redrawn on the sheet of paper below the remaining portion of the figure. In order to keep the shapes steady on the screen when moving portions were redrawn, Barre proposed steadying the sheets of paper on a pair of pegs at the top of the drawing. This peg system of registration has remained central to drawn animation ever since, because it allows cels drawn by different animators to fit together smoothly. During 1915, Barre used the slash system to create a brief series of “Animated Grouch Chasers” for the Edison Company. These were live-action shorts with embedded animated sequences (3.59).
During the 1910s, animation was done by independent firms that sold the rights to their films to distributors. Cartoons were sometimes among the shorts shown on programs before features. During the 1920s, thanks in part to the labor-saving devices developed during the 1910s, animated shorts would become a much more regular element of movie programs.
World History
