During this period, the French film industry was still the largest, and its movies were the ones most frequently seen around the world. The two main firms, Pathe Freres and Gaumont, continued to expand, and other companies were formed in response to an increased demand from exhibitors. As in many western countries, workers were winning a shorter workweek and thus had more leisure time for inexpensive entertainments. The French firms also courted a wider middle-class audience.
From 1905 to 1906, the French film industry grew rapidly. Pathe was already a large company, with three separate studios. It was also one of the earliest film companies to become vertically integrated. A vertically integrated firm is one controlling the production, distribution,
And exhibition of a film. As we shall see time and again in this book, vertical integration has been a major strategy pursued by film companies and often a measure of their strength. Pathe made its own cameras and projectors, produced films, and manufactured the film stock for release prints. In 1906, Pathe also began buying theaters. The following year, the firm began to distribute its own films by renting rather than selling them to exhibitors. By then, it was the largest film company in the world. Over the next few years, it started distributing films made by other companies as well.
By 1905, Pathe employed six filmmakers, still overseen by Ferdinand Zecca, each making a film a week. The films encompassed a variety of genres: actualities, historical films, trick films, dramas, vaudeville acts, and chases. During 1903 and 1904, PatM created an elaborate system for hand-stenciling color onto release prints. Stencils were painstakingly cut from a copy of the film itself, with a different stencil for each color. Assembly lines of women workers then painted the colors frame by frame on each release print. Pathe reserved color for trick films and films displaying flowers or elegantly dressed women (Color Plate 2.1). Such hand-coloring continued until the early sound era.
Among Pathe’s most profitable films were series starring popular comics: the “Boireau” series (with Andre Deed), the “Rigadin” films (with the music-hall star Prince), and, above all, the Max Linder series. Linder’s films reflected the industry’s growing bid for respectability by being set in a middle-class milieu (2.1). Max typically suffered embarrassment in social situations, such as wearing painfully tight shoes to an elegant dinner. He was often thwarted in love; in Une ruse de mart (“The Husband’s Ruse”), he unsuccessfully tries to commit suicide in various ways, calling upon his valet to fetch a knife, a gun, and so on. Linder’s films were enormously influential. Charles Chaplin once referred to Linder as his “professor” and himself as Linder’s “disciple.” 1 Linder worked in both the United States and France from 1909 until his death in 1925.
Aside from being a vertically integrated firm, Pathe also used the strategy of horizontal integration. This term means that a firm expands within one sector of the film industry, as when one production firm acquires and absorbs another one. Pathe enlarged its film production by opening studios in such places as Italy, Russia, and the United States. From 1909 to 1911, its Moscow branch made about half the films produced in Russia.
Pathe’s main French rival, Gaumont, also expanded rapidly. After finishing its new studio in 1905, the firm took on additional filmmakers. Alice Guy trained this
2.1 Max Linder in Une ruse de mari (“The Husband’s Ruse,” directed by Linder in 1913). Linder’s distinctive appearance—elegant clothes, top hat, and dapper moustache —influenced other comics to adopt trademark outfits.
2.2 Alice Guy collaborated with designer Victorin Jasset on La Naissance, la vie et la mort de Notre-Seigneur Jesus-Christ (“The Birth, Life, and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” 1906). This scene of the scourging of Christ indicates the elaborate staging and sets used for some prestige films of this period.
Staff and turned to making longer films herself (2.2). Among the new filmmakers was scriptwriter and director Louis Feuillade, who took over the supervision of Gaumont’s films when Guy left in 1908. He became one of the silent cinema’s most important artists, and his career paralleled Gaumont’s fortunes until the 1920s. Feuillade was extraordinarily versatile, making comedies, historical films (see Color Plate 2.3), thrillers, and melodramas.
Following Pathe’s lead, other companies and entrepreneurs opened film theaters, aiming at affluent consumers. Such theaters often showed longer and more prestigious films. Prosperity in the French industry and in film exports led to the formation of several smaller firms during this period.
One of these had a significant impact. As its name suggests, the Film d’Art company, founded in 1908, identified itself with elite tastes. One of its first efforts was The Assassination of the Due de Guise (1908, Charles Le Bargy and Andre Calmettes). Using stage stars, a script by a famous dramatist, and an original score by classical composer Camille Saint-Saens, the film told the
2.3, 2.4 The sets and acting in The Assassination of the Due de Guise derived from the theater. Its shots, however, showed characters moving smoothly from one space to another, as when the Duc de Guise walks through a curtained doorway to confront his
Enemies
2.5, left The large sets, crowd scenes, and lavish historical costumes of The Fall of Troy were typical of Italian epics.
2.6, right French-born clown Ferdinand Guillaume as the popular Polidor in Polidor coi baffi (“Polidor’s Moustache,” 1914).
Story of a famous incident in French history (2.3, 2.4). It was widely shown and had a successful release in the United States. The Assassination of the Due de Guise and similar works created a model of what art films should be like. The Film d’Art company, however, lost money on most of its productions and was sold in 1911.
On the whole, the French industry prospered. By 1910, the traveling fetes foraines had dwindled, and large film theaters were the rule. During the same era, however, French firms were facing challenges in the lucrative American market and would soon lose their dominance over world markets.
Italy: Growth through Spectacle
Italy came somewhat late to the film production scene, but beginning in 1905 its film industry grew rapidly and within a few years, somewhat resembled that of France. Although films were produced in several cities, Rome’s Cines firm (founded in 1905) and Turin’s Ambrosio (1905) and Itala (1906) soon emerged as the principal companies. The new firms were handicapped by a lack of experienced personnel, and some lured artists away from French firms. For example, Cines hired one of Pathe’s main filmmakers, Gaston Velle, as its artistic director. As a result, some Italian films were imitations, even remakes, of French movies.
Exhibition also expanded rapidly. Italy depended less than other European countries on films being shown in traveling fairs and other temporary venues.
Instead, many permanent theaters opened. Thus, in Italy, cinema won respect as a new art form earlier than in other countries. Italian producers moved toward art films at about the same time that Film d’Art was making The Assassination of the Due de Guise. In 1908, the Ambrosio company made The Last Days of Pompeii, the first of many adaptations of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novel. As a result of this film’s popularity, the Italian cinema became identified with historical spectacle.
By 1910, Italy was probably second only to France in the number of films it sent around the world. Partly because Italian producers catered to permanent film theaters, they were among the first who consistently made films of more than one reel (that is, longer than fifteen minutes). For example, in 1910, a major director of the period, Giovanni Pastrone, made II Caduta de Troia (“The Fall of Troy”; 2.5) in three reels. The triumph of this and similar films encouraged Italian producers to make longer, more expensive epics, a trend that culminated in the mid-1910s.
Not all Italian films were epics, however. For example, beginning in 1909, producers again imitated the French by creating several comic series. Itala hired Pathe’s actor Andre Deed, who briefly abandoned his Boireau character to become Cretinetti (“Little Cretin”). Other companies found French or Italian comics to build series around, such as Ambrosio’s Robinet and Cines’s Polidor (2.6). These films were much cheaper than epics. They were also livelier and more sponta-
2.7 Nordisk’s second studio was typical of such buildings in many countries during the silent era. Glass walls and roofs permitted sunlight to illuminate
Scenes.
Neous, and they became internationally popular. Hundreds of such films were made, but the fad gradually declined during the 1910s.
Denmark: Nordisk and Ole Olsen
That a small country like Denmark became a significant player in world cinema was largely due to entrepreneur Ole Olsen. He had been an exhibitor, initially using a peepshow machine and later running one of the first movie theaters in Copenhagen. In 1906, he formed a production company, Nordisk, and immediately began opening distribution offices abroad. Nordisk’s breakthrough came in 1907 with Lion Hunt, a fiction film about a safari. Because two lions were actually shot during the production, the film was banned in Denmark, but the publicity generated huge sales abroad. The company’s New York branch, established in 1908, sold Nordisk films under the brand name Great Northern. In the same year, Olsen completed the first of four glass studios for indoor production (2.7).
Nordisk films quickly established an international reputation for excellent acting and production values. Nordisk specialized in crime thrillers, dramas, and somewhat sensationalistic melodramas, including “whiteslave” (prostitution) stories. Olsen had a circus set permanently installed, and some of the firm’s major films were melodramas of circus life, such as The Four Devils (1911, Robert Dineson and Alfred Lind) and Dodsspring til Hest fra Cirkus-Kuplen (“Death Jump on Horseback from the Circus Dome,” 1912, Eduard Schnedler-Sorensen). The latter film concerns a count who loses his fortune through covering the gambling debts of a friend. His skill at riding horses allows him to work in a circus, where he becomes romantically involved with two women (2.8). One of them jealously tries to kill him by causing his horse to plunge from a high platform; the second nurses him back to health. Rival producers admired such films for compressing abrupt plot twists and highly emotional situations into two or three reels.
Although a few smaller companies started up during this period, Olsen eventually managed either to buy them or to drive them out of business. Nevertheless, it was one of these short-lived small firms that made the two-reeler The Abyss (1910, Urban Gad), which brought instant fame to actress Asta Nielsen. Indeed, like Max Linder, she was one of the first international film stars. Dark and thin, with large, intense eyes, she possessed an unconventional beauty. She often played women destroyed by love: seduced and abandoned, or sacrificing themselves for the happiness of the men they love (see 2.15-2.17). Nielsen was equally adept at comedy, however, and, although she had trained in the theater, she was one of the earliest screen performers whose style seemed to owe nothing to the stage. Nielsen went on to work in Germany, where she became one of the mainstays of the industry.
The Danish industry remained healthy until World War I cut off many of its export markets.
2.8 A dramatic staging in depth in Dodsspring til Rest fra Cirkus-Kuplen: the heroine watches from the foreground as the hero demonstrates his equestrian skills in the circus ring.
Led by Cecil Hepworth’s production company, England remained a significant force in world film markets. Its 1905 film Rescued by Rover was one of the biggest international hits of its day. Filmmaking spread to other countries as well. The earliest systematic production in Japan, for example, was launched in 1908. Most films made there were apparently records of kabuki plays, filmed in static long shots. A few German production companies started up, though the industry did not begin to flourish until 1913. Pathe dominated Russian filmmaking, but several domestic firms also established themselves. In other countries, small production companies appeared, produced a few films, and vanished. None challenged France, Italy, Denmark, and the United States as the ruling industries on the international scene.
World History
