The work of understanding film history continues. For many years, historians considered the 1910s important for only a few events. It was widely known that World War I strangled European production, permitting Hollywood’s worldwide dominance. Griffith and Ince were studied as major American producer-directors; silent comedies, particularly those of Chaplin and Sennett, were also praised. Among foreign films, a few by Stiller and Sjostrom were considered classics.
The widespread revision of film history that has occurred in recent decades initially concentrated on preWorld War I cinema. Since the 1980s, however, scholars have paid increasing attention to the 1910s. A crucial contribution to this rediscovery has been the annual festival of silent film, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, held in Porde-none and Sacile, Italy, since 1982. Although the festival screens films from the entire silent period, some of its most dramatic revelations have come during its retrospectives concentrating on the 1910s. In 1986, an extensive program of pre-1919 Scandinavian films was shown. Among other revelations, this was the occasion for the international discovery of Georg af Klercker. Ironically, af Klercker’s departure from Svenska meant that the negatives of his films were not among those in the tragic Svenska fire of 1941; Hasselblad kept the negatives in its own vault, and twenty of his twenty-eight films for Hasselblad survive, many in nearly pristine condition. Similar programs have dealt with Hollywood cinema of the 1910s (1988), prerevolutionary Russian films (1989), and German cinema of the pre-1920 era (1990). Each festival was accompanied by a collection of important essays in Italian and English. See Paolo Cher-chi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli, eds., Sulla via di Hollywood 1911-1920 (Pordenone: Edizioni Biblioteca delPImma-gine, 1988); Yuri Tsivian, ed., Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908-1919 (London: British Film Institute, 1989); and Paolo Cherchi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli, eds., Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
Events like Le Giornate del Cinema Muto emphasize how crucial the preservation and availability of early films are to our knowledge of cinema history. Early synoptic histories were based on the few masterpieces available in film archives. While important in themselves, these films seldom gave an accurate indication of national cinemas as wholes. Moreover, some important filmmakers have been virtually forgotten. Le Giornate has been crucial in bringing such directors as Georg af Klercker and Evgenii Bauer to historians’ attention. Similarly, masterpieces like Die Landstrasse have been all but forgotten until a discovery (in this case by the Filmmuseum of the Netherlands) of a single copy. Today, many national archives take the opportunity of Le Giornate to display prints of newly discovered or restored films, which are then shown in other archives and museums around the world. Undoubtedly some unknown directors and lost films will occasionally resurface and modify our view of film history.
REFERENCES
1. Quoted in Yuri Tsivian, “Some Preparatory Remarks on Russian Cinema,” in Tsivian, ed., Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908-1919 (London: British Film Institute, 1989), p. 24.
2. Quoted in Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 10.
3. Ron Mottram, The Danish Cinema before Dreyer (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988), p. 117.
4. Louis Delluc, “Cinema: The Outlaw and His Wife,” (1919) in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism 1907-1939, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 188.
5. Quoted in Graham Shirley and Brian Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years (Australia: Angus & Robertson Publishers and Currency Press, 1983), p. 56.
FURTHER READING
Brewster, Ben. “Traffic in Souls: An Experiment in Feature-Length Narrative Construction.” Cinema Journal 31, no. 1 (fall 1991): 37-56.
DeBauche, Leslie Midkiff. Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
“Feuillade and the French Serial.” Issue of The Velvet Light Trap, 37 (spring 1996).
Forslund, Bengt. Victor Sjostrom: His Life and His Work. Trans. Peter Cowie. New York: New York Zoetrope,
1988.
Jacobs, Lea. “Belasco, De Mille and the Development of Lasky Lighting.” Film History 5, no. 4 (December
1993): 405-18.
Koszarski, Richard, ed. Rivals of D. W. Griffith: Alternate Auteurs, 1913-1918. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1976.
Lacassin, Francois. Louis Feuillade: Maitre des lions et des Vampires. Paris: Pierre Bordas et Fils, 1995.
Langer, Mark. “The Reflections ofJohn Randolph Bray: An Interview with Annotations.” Griffithiana 53 (May 1995): 95-131.
Olsson, Jan. “ ‘Classical’ vs. ‘Pre-Classical’: Ingeborg Holm and Swedish Cinema in 1913.” Griffithiana 50 (May 1994): 113-23.
Quaresima, Leonardo. “Dichter, heraus! The Autorenfilm and German Cinema of the 1910s.” Griffithiana 38/39 (October 1999): 101-20.
Robinson, David. “The Italian Comedy.” Sight and Sound 55, no. 2 (spring 1990): 105-12.
Silva, Fred, ed. Focus on The Birth of a Nation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.
Singer, Ben. “Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly.” Camera Obscura 22 (January 1990): 90-129.
Youngblood, Denise J. The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
PART
THE LATE SILENT ERA.
1919-1929
Although classical Hollywood form and style have been pervasive since the 1910s, we shall find many alternative approaches to filmmaking in different periods and places. So far we have looked at styles associated with a single filmmaker (such as Georges Melies or D. W. Griffith), with a company (Pathe), or with a national industry (the huge classical Hollywood cinema or the small Swedish production). Some groups of films belong to a unified movement. A movement involves several filmmakers, working for a limited period and usually in a single country, whose films share significant formal traits.
Because film movements arise as alternatives to the ordinary filmmaking of their day, they often employ unusual techniques. Since few commercial film industries encourage the use of techniques that might alienate the broad audience, how can such movements arise? For each movement, the reasons are different, and, for each one that we study, we shall look briefly at the conditions in the film industry and the country as a whole that permitted the movement to exist.
One broad trend in the arts began in the late nineteenth century and was causing a great ferment as the cinema was spreading. This trend has been labeled modernism. It signaled a major shift in cultural attitudes that arose large ly as a response to modern life—the late phases of the industrial revolution, especially the new modes of transportation and communication that were swiftly transforming people’s lives. Telephones, automobiles, and airplanes were considered great advances, yet they also seemed threatening, especially in their capacity to be used in warfare.
Photography, in particular, revolutionized the visual arts. Photographs could provide realistic portraits and show landscapes and cityscapes in enormous detail. Many painters moved away from the traditions of realism, portraiture, and subjects drawn from history and classical myth.
A new value was placed on experimentation and even shock value. The many movements that arose during the early twentieth century can all loosely be summed up as avant-garde (literally, the “advance watch,” or those at the forefront of a military unit). These new styles, which originated primarily in Europe, rejected the realistic depiction of a concrete world. The first such movement took place in the late nineteenth century and was termed French Impressionism; its practitioners abandoned painting the solid, permanent appearance of things and instead attempted to capture the fleeting patterns of light and shadow as they struck the eye.
During the early twentieth century, more modernist trends in painting quickly arose. Fauvism in France encouraged the use of bold colors and exaggerated shapes to elicit strong emotions rather than serene contemplation. At the same time, other French painters more coolly depicted several sides of objects, as if they were being seen in an impossible space from several viewpoints at once. This movement became known as Cubism. Beginning in 1908, proponents of German Expressionism attempted to express raw, extreme emotions, in painting through garish colors and distortion and in theater through emphasized gestures, loud declamation of lines, staring eyes, and choreographed movements.
The 1910s saw the beginnings of abstract painting, pioneered by Wassily Kandinsky and quickly spreading internationally. In Italy, the Futurists tried to capture the hectic pace of modern life by rendering the swirl and blur of movement. In Russia and, after the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union, some artists championed purely abstract compositions of simple shapes, a style known as Suprematism. In the 1920s, as Lenin called for swift industrial progress, Soviet artists based their works around the machine in a movement termed Constructivism.
In France during the 1920s, practitioners of Surrealism favored bizarre, irrational, artfully contrived juxtapositions of objects and actions. Going even further, the Dadaists advocated purely random mixtures of elements in artworks, reflecting what they saw as the madness of the postwar world. All of these styles, along with modernist movements and trends in literature, drama, and music, created a radical break with traditional artistic realism in a remarkably short time. The modernist tradition would dominate the arts throughout much of the twentieth century.
Given the liveliness and prominence of these modernist movements, it is not surprising that they sometimes influenced the cinema. The years from 1918 to 1933 saw an astonishing variety of explorations in alternative film styles. No fewer than three avant-garde movements arose within commercial industries and flourished briefly: French Impressionism (1918-1929), German Expressionism (1920-1927), and Soviet Montage (1925-1933). Moreover, the 1920s saw the beginnings of an independent experimental cinema—including Surrealism, Dadaism, and abstract films.
There are many reasons for such intense, varied activity in this period. One of the most important involves the new prominence of the Hollywood cinema as a stylistic and commercial force. Chapters 2 and 3 described the establishment of the narrative and stylistic premises of the classical Hollywood cinema during the 1910s. We also saw how the wartime decline in European production allowed American firms to expand into world markets.
After the war, widely differing situations existed in other producing nations, but all faced one common factor: a need to compete with Hollywood in the local market. In some countries, like Great Britain, such competition usually involved imitating Hollywood films. Other national cinemas followed this strategy but also encouraged filmmakers to experiment, in the hope that innovative films could compete with the Hollywood product. Some postwar avant-garde films became successful, partly on the basis of their novelty.
Since the invention of the cinema, virtually everyone thought of the new medium primarily as a form of entertainment and as a commercial product. Although some filmmakers, like Maurice Tourneur and Victor Sjostrom, took the cinema seriously as an art form, few observers conceived that filmmakers could experiment with modernist styles derived from the other arts. In the late 1910s and 1920s, however, this idea caught on in a number of European countries.
Many of the institutions we now consider integral parts of the film world first came into being then. For example, the specialized film journal, publishing theoretical and analytical articles, arose in France in the 1910s and proliferated internationally over the next decade. Similarly, the earliest groups of enthusiasts devoted to alternative cinema were formed—taking their name, the “cine-club,” from French groups that started the trend. Until the mid-1920s, there were no theaters devoted to the showing of art films. Whether a theater was large or smail, first-run or second-run, it showed ordinary commercial films. Gradually, however, the “little cinema” movement spread, again beginning in France. Such theaters catered to a small but loyal portion of the public interested in foreign and avant-garde films. Finally, the first conferences and exhibitions devoted to the cinema as an art were held during the 1920s.
Many of the circumstances that allow any film movement to come into being, however, are unique to its time and place. No single set of circumstances will predictably give rise to a movement. Indeed, as we shall see in the next three chapters, the conditions in France, Germany, and the Soviet Union differed vastly in the postwar era.
We shall go on to examine Hollywood in the 1920s, a period during which it continued to expand and to polish the classical narrative style developed during the previous decade (Chapter 7). Finally, we will look at international trends of this period, including efforts to resist Hollywood competition and attempts to create an international experimental cinema (Chapter 8).
World History
