motion picture, history of thehistory of the medium from the 19th century to the present.
Early years, 1830–1910

The illusion of motion pictures is based on the optical phenomena known as persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon. The first of these causes the brain to retain images cast upon the retina of the eye for a fraction of a second beyond their disappearance from the field of sight, while the latter creates apparent movement between images when they succeed one another rapidly. Together these phenomena permit the succession of still frames on a motion-picture film strip to represent continuous movement when projected at the proper speed (traditionally 16 frames per second for silent films and 24 frames per second for sound films). Before the invention of photography, a variety of optical toys exploited this effect by mounting successive phase drawings of things in motion on the face of a twirling disk (the phenakistoscope, c. 1832) or inside a rotating drum (the zoetrope, c. 1834). Then, in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a French painter, perfected the positive photographic process known as daguerreotypy, and that same year the English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot successfully demonstrated a negative photographic process that theoretically allowed unlimited positive prints to be produced from each negative. As photography was innovated and refined over the next few decades, it became possible to replace the phase drawings in the early optical toys and devices with individually posed phase photographs, a practice that was widely and popularly carried out.

There would be no true motion pictures, however, until live action could be photographed spontaneously and simultaneously. This required a reduction in exposure time from the hour or so necessary for the pioneer photographic processes to the one-hundredth (and, ultimately, one-thousandth) of a second achieved in 1870. It also required the development of the technology of series photography by the British American photographer Eadweard Muybridge between 1872 and 1877. During that time, Muybridge was employed by Governor Gov. Leland Stanford of California, a zealous racehorse breeder, to prove that at some point in its gallop a running horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at once. Conventions of 19th-century illustration suggested otherwise, and the movement itself occurred too rapidly for perception by the naked eye; , so Muybridge experimented with multiple cameras to take successive photographs of horses in motion. Finally, in 1877, he set up a battery of 12 cameras along a Sacramento racecourse with wires stretched across the track to operate their shutters. As a horse strode down the track, its hooves tripped each shutter individually to expose a successive photograph of the gallop, confirming Stanford’s belief. When Muybridge later mounted these images on a rotating disk and projected them on a screen through a magic lantern, they produced a “moving picture” of the horse at full gallop as it had actually occurred in life.

The French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey took the first series photographs with a single instrument in 1882; once again the impetus was the analysis of motion too rapid for perception by the human eye. Marey invented the chronophotographic gun, a camera shaped like a rifle that recorded 12 successive photographs per second, in order to study the movement of birds in flight. These images were imprinted on a rotating glass plate (later, paper roll film), and Marey subsequently attempted to project them. Like Muybridge, however, Marey was interested in deconstructing movement rather than synthesizing it, and he did not carry his experiments much beyond the realm of high-speed, or instantaneous, series photography. Muybridge and Marey, in fact, conducted their work in the spirit of scientific inquiry; they both extended and elaborated existing technologies in order to probe and analyze events that occurred beyond the threshold of human perception. Those who came after would return their discoveries to the realm of normal human vision and exploit them for profit.

In 1887 in Newark, New JerseyN.J., an Episcopalian minister named Hannibal Goodwin first used celluloid roll film developed the idea of using celluloid as a base for photographic emulsions, and within the year his idea had been appropriated by the . The inventor and industrialist George Eastman, who in 1888 began to mass-produce had earlier experimented with sensitized paper rolls for still photography, began manufacturing celluloid roll film for still photography in 1889 at his plant in Rochester, New YorkN.Y. This event was crucial to the development of cinematography: series photography such as Marey’s chronophotography could employ glass plates or paper strip film because it recorded events of short duration in a relatively small number of images, but cinematography would inevitably find its subjects in longer, more complicated events, requiring thousands of images and therefore just the kind of flexible but durable recording medium represented by celluloid. It remained for someone to combine the principles embodied in the apparatuses of Muybridge and Marey with celluloid strip film to arrive at a viable motion-picture camera—an innovation achieved by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson in the West Orange, New JerseyN.J., laboratories of the Edison Company in 1888.

Edison and the Lumière brothers

Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and it quickly become became the most popular home-entertainment device of the century. It was to provide a visual accompaniment to the phonograph that Edison commissioned Dickson, a young laboratory assistant, to invent a motion-picture camera in 18871888. Dickson built upon the work of Muybridge and Marey, a fact that he readily acknowledged, but he was the first to combine the two final essentials of motion-picture camera recording and projection viewing technology. These were a device, adapted from the escapement mechanism of a clock, to ensure the intermittent but regular motion of the film strip through the camera and a regularly perforated celluloid film strip to ensure precise synchronization between the film strip and the shutter. Dickson’s camera, the Kinetograph, initially imprinted up to 50 feet (15 metres) of celluloid film at the rate of about 40 frames per second.

Dickson was not the only person who had been tackling the problem of recording and reproducing moving images. Inventors throughout the world had been trying for years to devise working motion-picture machines. In fact, several European inventors, including the French-born Louis Le Prince and the Englishman William Friese-Greene, applied for patents on various cameras, projectors, and camera-projector combinations contemporaneously or even before Edison and his associates did. These machines were unsuccessful for a number of reasons, however, and little evidence survives of their actual practicality or workability.

Because Edison had originally conceived of motion pictures as an adjunct to his phonograph, he did not commission the invention of a projector to accompany the Kinetograph. Rather, he had Dickson design a type of peep-show viewing device called the Kinetoscope, in which a continuous 47-foot (14-metre) film loop ran on spools between an incandescent lamp and a shutter for individual viewing. Starting in 1894, Kinetoscopes were marketed commercially through the firm of Raff and Gammon for $250 to $300 apiece. The Edison Company established its own Kinetograph studio (a single-room building called the “Black Maria” that rotated on tracks to follow the sun) in West Orange, New JerseyN.J., to supply films for the Kinetoscopes that Raff and Gammon were installing in penny arcades, hotel lobbies, amusement parks, and other such semipublic places. In April of that year the first Kinetoscope parlour was opened in a converted storefront in New York City. The parlour charged 25 cents for admission to a bank of five machines.

The syndicate of Maguire and Baucus acquired the foreign rights to the Kinetoscope in 1894 and began to market the machines. Edison opted not to file for international patents on either his camera or his viewing device, and, as a result, the machines were widely and legally copied throughout Europe, where they were modified and improved far beyond the American originals. In fact, it was a Kinetoscope exhibition in Paris that inspired the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, to invent the first commercially viable projector. Their cinématographe, which functioned as a camera and printer as well as a projector, ran at the economical speed of 16 frames per second. It was given its first commercial demonstration on December Dec. 28, 1895.

Unlike the Kinetograph, which was battery-driven and weighed more than 1,000 pounds (453 kg), the cinématographe was hand-cranked, lightweight (less than 20 pounds [9 kg]), and relatively portable. This naturally affected the kinds of films that were made with each machine: Edison films initially featured material such as circus or vaudeville acts that could be brought taken into a small studio to perform before an inert camera, while early Lumière films were mainly documentary views, or “actualities,” shot outdoors on location. In both cases, however, the films themselves were composed of a single , unedited shot emphasizing lifelike movement; they contained little or no narrative content. (After a few years design changes in the machines made it possible for Edison and the Lumières to shoot the same kinds of subjects.) In general, Lumière technology became the European standard during the early primitive era, and, because the Lumières sent their cameramen all over the world in search of exotic subjects, the cinématographe became the founding instrument of distant cinemas in Russia, Australia, and Japan.

In the United States the Kinetoscope installation business had reached the saturation point by the summer of 1895, although it was still quite profitable for Edison as a supplier of films. Raff and Gammon persuaded Edison to buy the rights to a state-of-the-art projector, developed by Thomas Armat of Washington, D.C., which incorporated a superior intermittent movement mechanism and a loop-forming device (known as the Latham loop, after its earliest promoters, Grey Latham and Otway Latham) to reduce film breakage, and in early 1896 Edison began to manufacture and market this machine as his own invention. Given its first public demonstration on April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City, the Edison Vitascope brought projection to the United States and established the format for American film exhibition for the next several years. It also encouraged the activities of such successful Edison rivals as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, which was formed in 1896 to exploit the Mutoscope peep-show device and the American Biograph camera and projector patented by W.K.L. Dickson in 1896. During this time, which has been characterized as the “novelty period,” emphasis fell on the projection device itself, and films achieved their main popularity as self-contained vaudeville attractions. Vaudeville houses, locked in intense competition at the turn of the century, headlined the name of the machines rather than the films (e.g., “The Vitascope—Edison’s Latest Marvel,” “The Amazing Cinématographe”). The producer, or manufacturer, supplied projectors along with an operator and a program of shorts. These films, whether they were Edison-style theatrical variety shorts or Lumière-style actualities, were perceived by their original audiences not as motion pictures in the modern sense of the term but as “animated photographs” or “living pictures,” emphasizing their continuity with more familiar media of the time.

During the novelty period, the film industry was autonomous and unitary, with production companies leasing a complete film service of projector, operator, and shorts to the vaudeville market as a single, self-contained act. Starting about 1897, however, manufacturers began to sell both projectors and films to itinerant exhibitors who traveled with their programs from one temporary location (vaudeville theatres, fairgrounds, circus tents, lyceums) to another as the novelty of their films wore off at a given site. This new mode of screening by circuit marked the first separation of exhibition from production and gave the exhibitors a large measure of control over early film form, since they were responsible for arranging the one-shot films purchased from the producers into audience-pleasing programs. The putting together of these programs—which often involved narration, sound effects, and music—was in effect a primitive form of editing, so that it is possible to regard the itinerant projectionists working between 1896 and 1904 as the earliest directors of motion pictures. Several of them, notably Edwin S. Porter, were, in fact, hired as directors by production companies after the industry had stabilized in the first decade of the 20th century.

By encouraging the practice of peripatetic exhibition, the American producers’ policy of outright sales inhibited the development of permanent film theatres in the United States until nearly a decade after their appearance in Europe, where England and France had taken an early lead in both production and exhibition. Britain’s first projector, the theatrograph (later the animatograph), had been demonstrated in 1896 by the scientific-instrument maker Robert W. Paul. In 1899 Paul formed his own production company for the manufacture of actualities and trick films, and until 1905 Paul’s Animatograph Works, Ltd., was England’s largest producer, turning out an average of 50 films per year. Between 1896 and 1898, two Brighton photographers, George Albert Smith and James Williamson, constructed their own motion-picture cameras and began producing trick films featuring superimpositions (The Corsican Brothers, 1897) and interpolated close-ups (Grandma’s Reading Glass, 1900; The Big Swallow, 1901). Smith subsequently developed the first commercially successful photographic colour process (Kinemacolor, c. 1906–08, with Charles Urban), while Williamson experimented with parallel editing as early as 1900 (Attack on a Chinese Mission Station) and became a pioneer of the chase film (Stop Thief!, 1901; Fire!, 1901). Both Smith and Williamson had built studios at Brighton by 1902 and, with their associates, came to be known as members of the “Brighton school,” although they did not represent a coherent movement. Another important early British filmmaker was Cecil Hepworth, whose Rescued by Rover (1905) is regarded by many historians as the most skillfully edited narrative produced before the Biograph shorts of D.W. Griffith.

Méliès and Porter

The shift in consciousness away from films as animated photographs to films as stories, or narratives, began to take place about the turn of the century and is most evident in the work of the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Méliès was a professional magician who had become interested in the illusionist possibilities of the cinématographe; when the Lumières refused to sell him one, he bought an animatograph projector from Paul in 1896 and reversed its mechanical principles to design his own camera. The following year he organized the Star Film company and constructed a small glass-enclosed studio on the grounds of his house at Montreuil, where he produced, directed, photographed, and acted in more than 500 films between 1896 and 1913.

Initially Méliès used stop-motion photography (the camera and action are stopped while something is added to or removed from the scene, ; then filming and action are continued) to make one-shot “trick” films in which objects disappeared and reappeared or transformed themselves into other objects entirely. These films were widely imitated by producers in England and the United States. Soon, however, Méliès began to experiment with brief multiscene films, such as L’Affaire Dreyfus (The Dreyfus Affair; his first, 1899), his first, which followed the logic of linear temporality to establish causal sequences and tell simple stories. By 1902 he had produced the influential 30-scene narrative Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon). Adapted from a novel by Jules Verne, it was nearly one reel in length (about 825 feet [251 metres], or 14 minutes).

The first film to achieve international distribution (mainly through piracy), Le Voyage dans la lune was an enormous popular success. It helped to make Star Film one of the world’s largest producers (an American branch was opened in 1903) and to establish the fiction film as the cinema’s mainstream product. In both respects Méliès dethroned the Lumières’ cinema of actuality. Despite his innovations, Méliès’s productions remained essentially filmed stage plays. He conceived them quite literally as successions of living pictures or, as he termed them, “artificially arranged scenes.” From his earliest trick films through his last successful fantasy, La Conquête du pole (“The Conquest of the Pole,” 1912), Méliès treated the frame of the film as the proscenium arch of a theatre stage, never once moving his camera or changing its position within a scene. He ultimately lost his audience in the late 1910s to filmmakers with more sophisticated narrative techniques.

The origination of many such techniques is closely associated with the work of Edwin S. Porter, a freelance projectionist and engineer who joined the Edison Company in 1900 as production head of its new skylight studio on East 21st Street in New York City. For the next few years, he served as director-cameraman for much of Edison’s output, starting with simple one-shot films (Kansas Saloon Smashers, 1901) but and progressing rapidly to trick films (The Finish of Bridget McKeen, 1901) and short multiscene narratives based on political cartoons and contemporary events (Sampson-Schley Controversy, 1901; Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison, 1901). Porter also filmed the extraordinary Pan-American Exposition by Night (1901), which used time-lapse photography to produce a circular panorama of the exposition’s electrical illumination, and the 10-scene Jack and the Beanstalk (1902), a narrative that simulates the sequencing of lantern slides to achieve a logical, if elliptical, spatial continuity.

It was probably Porter’s experience as a projectionist at the Eden Musee Musée theatre in 1898 that ultimately led him in the early 1900s to the practice of continuity editing. The process of selecting one-shot films and arranging them into a 15-minute program for screen presentation was very much like that of constructing a single film out of a series of separate shots. Porter, by his own admission, was also influenced by other filmmakers—especially Méliès, whose Le Voyage dans la lune he came to know well in the process of duplicating it for illegal distribution by Edison in October 1902. Years later Porter claimed that the Méliès film had given him the notion of “telling a story in continuity form,” which resulted in The Life of an American Fireman (about 400 feet [122 metres], or six minutes, produced in late 1902 and released in January 1903). This film, which was also influenced by James Williamson’s Fire!, combined archival footage with staged scenes to create a nine-shot narrative of a dramatic rescue from a burning building. It was for years the subject of controversy because in a later version the last two scenes were intercut, or crosscut, into a 14-shot parallel sequence. It is now generally believed that in the earliest version of the film these scenes, which repeat the same rescue operation from an interior and exterior point of view, were shown in their entirety, one after the other. This repetition, or overlapping continuity, which owes much to magic lantern shows, clearly defines the spatial relationships between scenes but leaves temporal relationships underdeveloped and, to modern sensibilities, confused. Contemporary audiences, however, were conditioned by lantern slide projections and even comic strips; they understood a sequence of motion-picture shots to be a series of individual moving photographs, each of which was self-contained within its frame. Spatial relationships were clear in such earlier narrative forms because their only medium was space.

Motion pictures, however, exist in time as well as space, and the major problem for early filmmakers was the establishment of temporal continuity from one shot to the next. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) is widely acknowledged to be the first narrative film to achieve have achieved such continuity of action. Comprised of Comprising 14 separate shots of noncontinuous, nonoverlapping action, the film contains an early example of parallel editing, two credible back, or rear, projections (the projection from the rear of previously filmed action or scenery onto a translucent screen to provide the background for new action filmed in front of the screen), two camera pans, and several shots composed diagonally and staged in depth—a major departure from the frontally composed, theatrical staging of Méliès.

The industry’s first spectacular box-office success, The Great Train Robbery is credited with establishing the realistic narrative, as opposed to Méliès-style fantasy, as the commercial cinema’s dominant form. The film’s popularity encouraged investors and led to the establishment of the first permanent film theatres, or nickelodeons, across the country. Running about 12 minutes, it also helped to boost standard film length toward one reel, or 1,000 feet (305 metres [about 16 minutes at the average silent speed]). Despite the film’s success, Porter continued to practice overlapping action in such conventional narratives as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) and the social justice dramas The Ex-Convict (1904) and The Kleptomaniac (1905). He experimented with model animation in The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906) and The Teddy Bears (1907) but lost interest in the creative aspects of filmmaking as the process became increasingly industrialized. He left Edison in 1909 to pursue a career as a producer and equipment manufacturer. Porter, like Méliès, could not adapt to the linear narrative modes and assembly-line production systems that were developing.

Early growth of the film industry

Méliès’s decline was assisted by the industrialization of the French and, for a time, the entire European cinema by the Pathé Frères company, founded in 1896 by the former phonograph importer Charles Pathé. Financed by some of France’s largest corporations, Pathé acquired the Lumière patents in 1902 and commissioned the design of an improved studio camera that soon dominated the market on both sides of the Atlantic (it has been estimated that, before 1918, 60 percent of all films were shot with a Pathé camera). Pathé also manufactured his own film stock and in 1902 established a vast production facility at Vincennes where films were turned out on an assembly-line basis under the managing direction of Ferdinand Zecca. The following year, Pathé began to open foreign sales agencies, which would soon become full-blown production companies—Hispano Film (1906), Pathé-Rouss, Moscow (1907), Film d’Arte Italiano (1909), Pathé-Britannia, London (1909), and Pathé-America (1910). He acquired permanent exhibition sites, building the world’s first luxury cinema (the Omnia-Pathé) in Paris in 1906. In 1911 Pathé became Méliès’s distributor and helped to drive Star Film out of business.

Pathé’s only serious rival on the Continent at this time was Gaumont Pictures, founded by the engineer-inventor Léon Gaumont in 1895. Though never more than one-fourth the size of Pathé, Gaumont followed the same pattern of expansion, manufacturing its own equipment and mass-producing films under a supervising director (through 1906, Alice Guy, the cinema’s first woman female director; afterward, Louis Feuillade). Like Pathé, Gaumont opened foreign offices and acquired theatre chains. From 1905 to 1914 its studios at La Villette, France, were the largest in the world. Pathé and Gaumont dominated pre-World War I motion-picture production, exhibition, and sales in Europe, and they effectively brought to an end the artisanal mode of filmmaking practiced by Méliès and his British contemporaries.

In the United States a similar pattern was emerging through the formation of film exchanges and the consolidation of an industry-wide industrywide monopoly based on the pooling of patent rights. About 1897 producers had adopted the practice of selling prints outright, which had the effect of promoting itinerant exhibition and discriminating against the owners of permanent sites. In 1903, in response to the needs of theatre owners, Harry J. Miles and Herbert Miles opened a film exchange in San Francisco. The exchange functioned as a broker between producers and exhibitors, buying prints from the former and leasing them to the latter for 25 percent of the purchase price (in subsequent practice, rental fees were calculated on individual production costs and box-office receipts). The exchange system of distribution quickly caught on because it profited nearly everyone: the new middlemen made fortunes by collecting multiple revenues on the same prints; exhibitors were able to reduce their overheads and vary their programs without financial risk; and, ultimately, producers experienced a tremendous surge in demand for their product as exhibition and distribution boomed nationwide. (Between November 1906 and March 1907, for example, producers increased their weekly output from 10,000 to 28,000 feet [3,000 to 8,500 metres] and still could not meet demand.)

The most immediate effect of the rapid rise of the distribution sector was the nickelodeon boom, the exponential growth of permanent film theatres in the United States from a mere handful in 1904 to between 8,000 and 10,000 by 1908. Named for the Nickelodeon (ersatz Greek for “nickel theatre”), which opened in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania, in 1905, these theatres were makeshift facilities lodged in converted storefronts. They showed approximately an hour’s worth of films for an admission price of 5 to 10 cents. Originally identified with working-class audiences, nickelodeons appealed increasingly to the middle class as the decade wore on, and they became associated with the rising popularity of the story film. Their spread also forced the standardization of film length at one reel, or 1,000 feet (305 metres), to facilitate high-efficiency production and the trading of products within the industry.

By 1908 there were about 20 motion-picture production companies operating in the United States. They were constantly at war with one another over business practices and patent rights, and they had begun to fear that their fragmentation would cause them to lose control of the industry to the two new sectors of distribution and exhibition. The most powerful among them—Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Kalem, Selig Polyscope, Lubin, the American branches of the French Star Film and Pathé Frères, and Kleine Optical, the largest domestic distributor of foreign films—therefore entered into a collusive trade agreement to ensure their continued dominance. On September Sept. 9, 1908, these companies formed the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), pooling the 16 most significant U.S. patents for motion-picture technology and entering into an exclusive contract with the Eastman Kodak Company for the supply of raw film stock.

The MPPC, also known as the “Trust,” sought to control every segment of the industry and therefore set up a licensing system for assessing royalties. The use of its patents was granted only to licensed equipment manufacturers; film stock could be sold only to licensed producers; licensed producers and importers were required to fix rental prices at a minimum level and to set quotas for foreign footage to reduce competition; Patents Company MPPC films could be sold only to licensed distributors, who could lease them only to licensed exhibitors; and only licensed exhibitors had the right to use Patents Company MPPC projectors and rent company films. To solidify its control, in 1910—the same year in which motion-picture attendance in the United States rose to 26 million persons a week—the MPPC formed the General Film Company, which integrated the licensed distributors into a single corporate entity. Although it was clearly monopolistic in practice and intent, the MPPC helped to stabilize the American film industry during a period of unprecedented growth and change by standardizing exhibition practice, increasing the efficiency of distribution, and regularizing pricing in all three sectors. Its collusive nature, however, provoked a reaction that ultimately destroyed it.

In a sense, the MPPC’s ironclad efforts to eliminate competition merely fostered it. Almost from the outset there was widespread resistance to the Patents Company MPPC on the part of independent distributors (numbering 10 or more in early 1909) and exhibitors (estimated at 2,000 to 2,500); , and in January 1909 they formed their own trade association, the Independent Film Protective Association—reorganized that fall as the National Independent Moving Picture Alliance—to provide financial and legal support against the Trust. A more effective and powerful anti-Trust organization was the Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Company, which began operation in May 1910 (three weeks after the inception of General Film) and which eventually came to serve 47 exchanges in 27 cities. For nearly two years, independents were able to present a united front through the Sales Companycompany, which finally split into two rival camps in the spring of 1912 (the Mutual Film Corporation and the Universal Film Manufacturing Company).

By imitating Patents Company MPPC practices of joining forces and licensing, the early independents were able to compete effectively against the Trust in its first three years of operation, netting about 40 percent of all American film business. In fact, their product, the one-reel short, and their mode of operation were initially fundamentally the same as the MPPC’s. The independents later revolutionized the industry, however, by adopting the multiple-reel film as their basic product, a move that caused the MPPC to embrace the one-reeler with a vengeance, hastening its own demise.

The silent years, 1910–27
Pre-World War I American cinema

Multiple-reel films had appeared in the United States as early as 1907, when Adolph Zukor distributed Pathé’s three-reel Passion Play; , but when Vitagraph produced the five-reel The Life of Moses in 1909, the Patents Company MPPC forced it to be released in serial fashion at the rate of one reel a week. The multiple-reel film—which came to be called a “feature,” in the vaudevillian sense of a headline attraction—achieved general acceptance with the smashing success of Louis Mercanton’s three-and-one-half-reel La Reine Elisabeth (Queen Elizabeth, 1912), which starred Sarah Bernhardt and was imported by Zukor (who founded the independent Famous Players production company with its profits). In 1912 Enrico Guazzoni’s nine-reel Italian superspectacle Quo Vadis? (“Whither Are You Going?”) was road-shown in legitimate theatres across the country at a top admission price of one dollar, and the feature craze was on.

At first there were difficulties in distributing features, because the exchanges associated with both the Patents Company MPPC and the independents were geared toward cheaply made one-reel shorts. Because of their more elaborate production values, features had relatively higher negative costs. This was a disadvantage to distributors, who charged a uniform price per foot. By 1914, however, several national feature-distribution alliances that correlated pricing with a film’s negative cost and box-office receipts were organized. These new exchanges demonstrated the economic advantage of multiple-reel films over shorts. Exhibitors quickly learned that features could command higher admission prices and longer runs; single-title packages were also cheaper and easier to advertise than programs of multiple titles. As for manufacturing, producers found that the higher expenditure for features was readily amortized by high volume sales to distributors, who in turn were eager to share in the higher admission returns from the theatres. The whole industry soon reorganized itself around the economics of the multiple-reel film, and the effects of this restructuring did much to give motion pictures their characteristic modern form.

Feature films made motion pictures respectable for the middle class by providing a format that was analogous to that of the legitimate theatre and was suitable for the adaptation of middle-class novels and plays. This new audience had more demanding standards than the older working-class one, and producers readily increased their budgets to provide high technical quality and elaborate productions. The new viewers also had a more refined sense of comfort, which exhibitors quickly accommodated by replacing their storefronts with large, elegantly appointed new theatres in the major urban centres (one of the first was Mitchell L. Marks’s 3,300-seat Strand, which opened in the Broadway district of Manhattan in 1914). Known as “dream palaces” because of the fantastic luxuriance of their interiors, these houses had to show features rather than a program of shorts to attract large audiences at premium prices. By 1916 there were more than 21,000 movie palaces theatres in the United States. Their advent marked the end of the nickelodeon era and foretold the rise of the Hollywood studio system, which dominated urban exhibition from the 1920s to the ’50s. Before the new studio-based monopoly could be established, however, the patents-based monopoly of the MPPC had to expire, and this it did about 1914 as a result of its own basic assumptions.

As conceived by Edison, the basic operating principle of the Trust was to control the industry through patents pooling and licensing, an idea logical enough in theory but difficult to practice in the context of a dynamically changing marketplace. Specifically, the Trust’s failure to anticipate the independents’ widespread and aggressive resistance to its policies cost it a fortune in patent-infringement litigation. Furthermore, the Trust badly underestimated the importance of the feature film, permitting the independents to claim this popular new product as entirely their own. Another issue that the MPPC misjudged was the power of the marketing strategy known as the “star system.” Borrowed from the theatre industry, this system involves the creation and management of publicity about key performers, or stars, to stimulate demand for their films. Trust company producers used this kind of publicity after 1910, when Carl Laemmle of Independent Motion Pictures (IMP) promoted Florence Lawrence into national stardom through a series of media stunts in St. Louis, MissouriMo., but they never exploited the technique as forcefully or as imaginatively as the independents did. Finally, and most decisively, in August 1912 the U.S. Justice Department brought suit against the MPPC for “restraint of trade” in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Delayed by countersuits and by World War I, the government’s case was eventually won, and the MPPC formally dissolved in 1918, although it had been functionally inoperative since 1914.

The rise and fall of the Patents Company MPPC was concurrent with the industry’s move to southern California. As a result of the nickelodeon boom, exhibitors had some exhibitors—who showed three separate programs over a seven-day period—had begun to require as many as 20 to 30 new films per week, and it became necessary to put production on a systematic year-round schedule. Because most films were still shot outdoors in available light, such schedules could not be maintained in the vicinity of New York City or Chicago, where the industry had originally located itself in order to take advantage of trained theatrical labour pools. As early as 1907, production companies, such as Selig Polyscope, began to dispatch production units to warmer climates during winter. It was soon clear that what producers required was a new industrial centre—one with warm weather, a temperate climate, a variety of scenery, and other qualities (such as access to acting talent) essential to their highly unconventional form of manufacturing.

Various companies experimented with location shooting in Jacksonville, FloridaFla., in San Antonio, Texas, in Santa Fe, New MexicoN.M., and even in Cuba, but the ultimate site of the American film industry was a Los Angeles suburb (originally a small industrial town) called Hollywood. It is generally thought that Hollywood’s distance from the MPPC’s headquarters in New York City made it attractive to the independents, but Patents Company MPPC members such as Selig, Kalem, Biograph, and Essanay had also established facilities there by 1911 in response to a number of the region’s attractions. These included the temperate climate required for year-round production (the U.S. Weather Bureau estimated that an average of 320 days per year were sunny or clear); a wide range of topography within a 50-mile (80-km) radius of Hollywood, including mountains, valleys, forests, lakes, islands, seacoast, and desert; the status of Los Angeles as a professional theatrical centre; the existence of a low tax base; and the presence of cheap and plentiful labour and land. This latter factor enabled the newly arrived production companies to buy up tens of thousands of acres of prime real estate on which to locate their studios, standing sets, and backlots.

By 1915 approximately 15,000 workers were employed by the motion-picture industry in Hollywood, and more than 60 percent of American production was centred there. In that same year the trade journal Variety reported that capital investment in American motion pictures—the business of artisanal craftsmen and fairground operators only a decade before—had exceeded $500 million. The most powerful companies in the new film capital were the independents, who were flush with cash from their conversion to feature production. These included the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation (later Paramount Pictures, c. 1927), which was formed by a merger of Zukor’s Famous Players Company, Jesse L. Lasky’s Feature Play Company, and the Paramount distribution exchange in 1916; Universal Pictures, founded by Carl Laemmle in 1912 by merging IMP with Powers, Rex, Nestor, Champion, and Bison; Goldwyn Picture Corporation, founded in 1916 by Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) and Edgar Selwyn; Metro Picture Corporation and Louis B. Mayer Pictures, founded by Louis B. Mayer in 1915 and 1917, respectively; and the Fox Film Corporation (later Twentieth Century–Fox, 1935), founded by William Fox in 1915. After World War I these companies were joined by Loew’s, Inc. (parent corporation of MGM, created by the merger of Metro, Goldwyn, and Mayer companies cited above, 1924), a national exhibition chain organized by Marcus Loew and Nicholas Schenck in 1919; First National Pictures, Inc., a circuit of independent exhibitors who established their own production facilities in Burbank, CaliforniaCalif., in 1922; Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc., founded by Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack Warner in 1923; and Columbia Pictures, Inc., incorporated in 1924 by Harry Cohn and Jack Cohn.

These organizations became the backbone of the Hollywood studio system, and the men who controlled them shared several important traits. They were all independent exhibitors and distributors who had outwitted the Trust and earned their success by manipulating finances in the postnickelodeon feature boom, merging production companies, organizing national distribution networks, and ultimately acquiring vast theatre chains. They saw their business as basically a retailing operation modeled on the practice of chain stores such as Woolworth’s and Sears. Not incidentally, these men were all first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, most of them with little formal education, while the audience they served was 90 percent Protestant and Catholic. This circumstance would become an issue during the 1920s, when the movies became a mass medium that was part of the life of every U.S. citizen and when Hollywood became the chief purveyor of American culture to the world.

Pre-World War I European cinema

Before World War I, European cinema was dominated by France and Italy. At Pathé Frères, director - general Ferdinand Zecca perfected the course comique, a uniquely Gallic version of the chase film, which inspired Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops, while the immensely popular Max Linder created a comic persona that would deeply influence the work of Charlie Chaplin. The episodic crime film was pioneered by Victorin Jasset in the “Nick Carter” Nick Carter series, produced for the small Éclair Company, but it remained for Gaumont’s Louis Feuillade to bring the genre to aesthetic perfection in the extremely successful serials Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915–16), and Judex (1916).

Another influential phenomenon initiated in prewar France was the film d’art movement. It began with L’Assassinat du duc de Guise (“The Assassination of the Duke of Guise,” 1908), directed by Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes of the Comédie Française for the Société Film d’Art, which was formed for the express purpose of transferring prestigious stage plays starring famous performers to the screen. L’Assassinat’s success inspired other companies to make similar films, which came to be known as films d’art. These films were long on intellectual pedigree and short on narrative sophistication. The directors simply filmed theatrical productions in toto, without adaptation. Their brief popularity nevertheless created a context for the lengthy treatment of serious material in motion pictures and was directly instrumental in the rise of the feature.

No country, however, was more responsible for the popularity of the feature than Italy. The Italian cinema’s lavishly produced costume spectacles brought it international prominence in the years before the war. The prototypes of the genre, by virtue of their epic material and length, were the Cines company’s six-reel Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompei), directed by Luigi Maggi in 1908, and its 10-reel remake, directed by Ernesto Pasquali in 1913; but it was Cines’s nine-reel Quo Vadis? (“Whither Are You Going?” 1912), with its huge three-dimensional sets recreating re-creating ancient Rome and its 5,000 extras, that established the standard for the superspectacle and briefly conquered the world market for Italian motion pictures. Its successor, the Italia company’s 12-reel Cabiria (1914), was even more extravagant in its historical reconstruction of the Second Punic War, from the burning of the Roman fleet at Syracuse to Hannibal crossing the Alps and the sack of Carthage. The Italian superspectacle stimulated public demand for features and influenced such important directors as Cecil B. DeMille, Ernst Lubitsch, and especially D.W. Griffith.

D.W. Griffith

There has been a tendency in modern film scholarship to view the narrative form of motion pictures as a development of an overall production system. Although narrative film was and continues to be strongly influenced by a combination of economic, technological, and social factors, it also owes a great deal to the individual artists who viewed film as a medium of personal expression. Chief among these innovators was D.W. Griffith. It is true that Griffith’s self-cultivated reputation as a Romantic artist—“the father of film technique,” “the man who invented Hollywood,” “the Shakespeare of the screen,” and the like—is somewhat overblown. It is also true that by 1908 film narrative had already been systematically organized to accommodate the material conditions of production. Griffith’s work nevertheless transformed that system from its primitive to its classical mode. He was the first filmmaker to realize that the motion-picture medium, properly vested with technical vitality and seriousness of theme, could exercise enormous persuasive power over an audience, or even a nation, without recourse to print or human speech.

Griffith began his film career in late 1907 as an actor. He was cast as the lead in the Edison Company’s Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (1907) and also appeared in many Biograph films. He had already attempted to make a living as a stage actor and a playwright without much success, and his real goal in approaching the film companies seems to have been to sell them scripts. In June 1908 Biograph gave him an opportunity to replace its ailing director, George (“Old Man”) McCutcheon, on the chase film The Adventures of Dollie. With the advice of the company’s two cameramen, G.W. (“Billy”) Bitzer (who would become Griffith’s personal cinematographer for much of his career) and Arthur Marvin (who actually shot the film), Griffith turned in a fresh and exciting film. His work earned him a full-time director’s contract with Biograph, for whom he directed more than 450 one- and two-reel films over the next five years.

In the Biograph films, Griffith experimented with all the narrative techniques he would later use in the epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)—techniques that helped to formulate and stabilize Hollywood’s classical narrative style. A few of these techniques were already in use when Griffith started; he simply refined them. Others were innovations Griffith devised to solve practical problems in the course of production. Still others resulted from his conscious analogy between film and literary narrative, chiefly Victorian novels and plays. In all cases, however, Griffith brought to the practice of filmmaking a seriousness of purpose and an intensity of vision that, which, combined with his intuitive mastery of film technique, made him the first great artist of the cinema.

Griffith’s first experiments were in the field of editing and involved varying the standard distance between the audience and the screen. In Greaser’s Gauntlet, made one month after Dollie, he first used a cut-in from a long shot to a full shot to heighten the emotional intensity of a scene. In an elaboration of this practice, he was soon taking shots from multiple camera setups—long shots, full shots, medium shots, close shots, and, ultimately, close-ups—and combining their separate perspectives into single dramatic scenes. By October 1908 Griffith was practicing parallel editing between the dual narratives of After Many Years, and the following year he extended the technique to the representation of three simultaneous actions in The Lonely Villa, cutting rapidly back and forth from between a band of robbers breaking into a suburban villa, to a woman and her children barricaded within, to and the husband rushing from town to the rescue. This type of crosscutting, or intercutting, came to be known as the “Griffith last-minute rescue” and was employed as a basic structural principle in both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. It not only employed the rapid alternation of shots but also called for the shots themselves to be held for shorter and shorter durations as the parallel lines of action converged; in its ability to create the illusion of simultaneous actions, the intercut chase sequence prefigured Soviet theories of montage by at least a decade, and it remains a basic component of narrative film form to this day.

Another area of experiment for Griffith involved camera movement and placement, most of which had been purely functional before him. When Biograph started sending his production unit to southern California in 1910, Griffith began to practice panoramic panning shots not only to provide visual information but also to engage his audience in the total environment of his films. Later he would prominently employ the tracking, or traveling, shot, in which the camera—and therefore the audience—participates in the dramatic action by moving with it. In California, Griffith discovered that camera angle could be used to comment upon the content of a shot or to heighten its dramatic emphasis in a way that the conventionally mandated head-on medium shot could not; and, at a time when convention dictated the flat and uniform illumination of every element in a scene, he pioneered the use of expressive lighting to create mood and atmosphere. Like so many of the other devices he brought into general use, these had all been employed by earlier directors, but Griffith was the first to practice them with the care of an artist and to rationalize them within the overall structure of his films.

Griffith’s one-reelers grew increasingly complex between 1911 and 1912, and he began to realize that only a longer and more expansive format could contain his vision. At first he made such two-reel films as Enoch Arden (1911), Man’s Genesis (1912), The Massacre (1912), and The Mothering Heart (1913), but these went virtually unnoticed by a public enthralled with such recent features from Europe as Queen Elizabeth and Quo Vadis? Finally Griffith determined to make an epic himself, based on the story of Judith and Holofernes from the Apocrypha. The result was the four-reel Judith of Bethulia (1913), filmed secretly on a 12-square-mile (31-square-km) set in Chatsworth Park, CaliforniaCalif. In addition to its structurally complicated narrative, Judith contained massive sets and battle scenes unlike anything yet attempted in American film. It cost twice the amount Biograph had allocated for its budget. Company officials, stunned at Griffith’s audacity and extravagance, tried to relieve the director of his creative responsibilities by promoting him to studio production chief. Griffith quit instead, publishing a full-page advertisement in The New York Dramatic Mirror (December Dec. 3, 1913), in which he took credit for all the Biograph films he had made from The Adventures of Dollie through Judith, as well as for the narrative innovations they contained. He then accepted an offer from Harry E. Aitken, the president of the recently formed Mutual Film Corporation, to head the feature production company Reliance-Majestic; he took Bitzer and most of his Biograph stock company with him.

As part of his new contract, Griffith was allowed to make two independent features per year, and for his first project he chose to adapt The Clansman, a novel about the American Civil War and Reconstruction by the Southern clergyman Thomas Dixon, Jr. (As a Kentuckian whose father had served as a Confederate officer, Griffith was deeply sympathetic to the material, which was highly sensational in its depiction of Reconstruction as a period in which mulatto carpetbaggers and their black henchmen had destroyed the social fabric of the South and given birth to a heroic Ku Klux Klan.) Shooting on the film began in secrecy in late 1914. Although a script existed, Griffith kept most of the continuity in his head—a remarkable feat considering that the completed film contained 1,544 separate shots at a time when the most elaborate of foreign spectacles boasted fewer than 100. When the film opened in March 1915, retitled The Birth of a Nation, it was immediately pronounced “epoch-making” and recognized as a remarkable artistic achievement. The complexity of its narrative and the epic sweep of its subject were unprecedented, but so , too , were its controversial manipulations of audience response, especially its blatant appeals to racism. Despite its brilliantly conceived battle sequences, its tender domestic scenes, and its dignified historical reconstructions, the film provoked fear and disgust with its shocking images of miscegenation and racial violence. As the film’s popularity swept the nation, denunciations followed, and many who had originally praised it, such as President Woodrow Wilson, were forced to recant. Ultimately, after screenings of The Birth of a Nation had caused riots in several cities, it was banned in eight Northern and Midwestern states. (First Amendment protection was not extended to motion pictures in the United States until the late 1950s1952.) Such measures, however, did not prevent The Birth of a Nation from becoming the single most popular film in history to datethroughout much of the 20th century; it achieved national distribution in the year of its release and was seen by nearly three million people.

Taking the lead in protesting against The Birth of a Nation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded six years prior to the film’s release, used the struggle as an organizing tool. The powerful impact of Griffith’s film meanwhile persuaded many black leaders that racial stereotyping in motion pictures could be more effectively challenged if African American filmmakers produced works more accurately and fairly depicting black life. For their first effort, The Birth of a Race (1919), black sponsors sought collaboration with white producers but lost control of the project, which was judged a failure. Other aspiring black filmmakers took note of the film’s problems and began to make their own works independently. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company (run by George P. Johnson and Noble Johnson) and the writer and entrepreneur Oscar Micheaux were among those who launched what became known as the genre of “race pictures,” produced in and for the black community.

Although it is difficult to believe that the film’s racism of The Birth of a Nation was unconscious, as some have claimed, it is easy to imagine that Griffith had not anticipated the power of his own images. He seems to have been genuinely stunned by the hostile public reaction to his masterpiece, and he fought back by publishing a pamphlet entitled The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America (1915), which vilified the practice of censorship and especially intolerance. At the height of his notoriety and fame, Griffith decided to produce a spectacular cinematic polemic against what he saw as a flaw in human character that had endangered civilization throughout history. The result was the massive epic Intolerance (1916), which interweaves stories of martyrdom from four separate historical periods. The film was conceived on a scale so monumental that it dwarfed all its predecessors. Crosscutting freely between a contemporary tale of courtroom injustice, the fall of ancient Babylon to Cyrus the Great in 539 BC, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in 16th-century France, and the Crucifixion of Christ, Griffith created an editing structure so abstract that contemporary audiences could not understand it. Even the extravagant sets and exciting battle sequences could not save Intolerance at the box office. To reduce his losses, Griffith withdrew the film from distribution after 22 weeks; he subsequently cut into the negative and released the modern and the Babylonian stories as two separate features, The Mother and the Law and The Fall of Babylon, in 1919. (Although ignored by Americans, Intolerance was both popular and vastly influential in the Soviet Union, where filmmakers minutely analyzed Griffith’s editing style and techniques.)

It would be fair to say that Griffith’s career as an innovator of film form ended with Intolerance, but his career as a film artist certainly did not. He went on to direct another 26 features between 1916 and 1931, chief among them the World War I anti-German propaganda epic (financed , in part , by the British government) Hearts of the World (1918), the subtle and lyrical Broken Blossoms (1919), and the rousing melodrama Way Down East (1920). The financial success of the latter made it possible for Griffith to establish his own studio at Mamaroneck, New YorkN.Y., where he produced the epics Orphans of the Storm (1921) and America (1924), which focused on the French and American revolutions, respectively; both lost money. Griffith’s next feature was the independent semidocumentary Isn’t Life Wonderful? (1925), which was shot on location in Germany and is thought to have influenced both the “street” films of the German director G.W. Pabst and the post-World War II Italian Neorealist movement.

Griffith’s last films, with the exception of The Struggle (1931), were all made for other producers. Not one could be called a success, although his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln (1930), was recognized as an effective essay in the new medium. The critical and financial failure of The Struggle, however, a version of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (The Drunkard), forced Griffith to retire.

It might be said of Griffith that, like Georges Méliès and Edwin S. Porter, he outlived his genius, but that is not true. Griffith was fundamentally a 19th-century man who became one of the 20th-century’s greatest artists. Transcending personal defects of vision, judgment, and taste, he developed the narrative language of film. He lost touch with his contemporaries because his subjects came to seem old-fashioned, but he remains peculiarly, uniquely in touch with the present because the techniques and structure he contributed to the motion-picture medium are still in useLater filmmakers adapted his techniques and structures to new themes and styles, while for Griffith his innovations were inextricably linked to a social vision that became obsolete while he was still in the prime of his working life.

Post-World War I European cinema

Prior to World War I, the American cinema had lagged behind the film industries of Europe, particularly those of France and Italy, in such matters as feature production and the establishment of permanent theatres. During the war, however, European film production virtually ceased, in part because the same chemicals used in the production of celluloid were necessary for the manufacture of gunpowder. The American cinema, meanwhile, experienced a period of unprecedented prosperity and growth. By the end of the war, it exercised nearly total control of the international market: when the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919, 90 percent of all films screened in Europe, Africa, and Asia were American, and the figure for South America was (and remained through the 1950s) close to 100 percent. The main exception was Germany, which had been cut off from American films from 1914 until the end of the war.


Before World War I, the German motion-picture audience was largely uneducated and unemployed or from the working class. Most of the films exhibited were imported from other countries, particularly Denmark. The few German films produced were usually cheaply and crudely made. This impoverished state of the domestic industry drew broadly from different social classes, and the country was among the leaders in the construction of film theatres. But German film production lagged behind that of several other European countries, and Denmark’s film industry in particular played a more prominent role in German film exhibition than did many domestic companies. This dependence on imported films became a matter of concern among military leaders during the war, when a flood of effective anti-German propaganda films began to pour into Germany from the Allied countries. Therefore, on December Dec. 18, 1917, the German general Erich Ludendorff ordered the merger of the main German production, distribution, and exhibition companies into the government-subsidized conglomerate Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA). UFA’s mission was to upgrade the quality of German films. The organization proved to be highly effective, and, when the war ended in Germany’s defeat in November 1918, the German film industry was prepared for the first time to compete in the international marketplace. Transferred to private control, UFA became the single largest studio in Europe and produced most of the films associated with the “golden age” of German cinema during the Weimar Republic (1919–33).

UFA’s first peacetime productions were elaborate costume dramas (Kostümfilme) in the vein of the prewar Italian superspectacles, and the master of this form was Ernst Lubitsch, who directed such lavish and successful historical pageants as Madame Du Barry (released in the United States as Passion, 1919), Anna Boleyn (Deception, 1920), and Das Weib des Pharao (The Loves of Pharaoh, 1921) before emigrating immigrating to the United States in 1922. These films earned the German cinema a foothold in the world market, but it was an Expressionist work, Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919), that brought the industry its first great artistic acclaim. Based on a scenario by the Czech poet Hans Janowitz and the Austrian writer Carl Mayer, the film recounts a series of brutal murders that are committed in the north German town of Holstenwall by a somnambulist at the bidding of a demented mountebank, who believes himself to be the incarnation of a homicidal 18th-century hypnotist named Dr. Caligari. Erich Pommer, Caligari’s producer at Decla-Bioskop (an independent production company that was to merge with UFA in 1921), added a scene to the original scenario so that the story appears to be narrated by a madman confined to an asylum of which the mountebank is director and head psychiatrist. To represent the narrator’s tortured mental state, the director, Robert Wiene, hired three prominent Expressionist artists—Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig, and Walter Reimann—to design sets that depicted exaggerated dimensions and deformed spatial relationships. To heighten this architectural stylization (and also to economize on electric power, which was rationed in postwar Germany), bizarre patterns of light and shadow were painted directly onto the scenery and even onto the characters’ makeup.

In its effort to embody disturbed psychological states through decor, Caligari influenced enormously the UFA films that followed it and gave rise to the movement known as German Expressionism. The films of this movement were completely studio-made and often used distorted sets and lighting effects to create a highly subjective mood. They were primarily films of fantasy and terror that employed horrific plots to express the theme of the soul in search of itself. Most were photographed by one of the two great cinematographers of the Weimar period, Karl Freund and Fritz Arno Wagner. Representative works include F.W. Murnau’s Der Januskopf (Janus-Faced, 1920), adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s Der Golem (The Golem, 1920), adapted from a Jewish legend in which a gigantic clay statue becomes a raging monster; Arthur Robison’s Schatten (Warning Shadows, 1922); Wiene’s Raskolnikow (1923), based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924); and Henrik Galeen’s Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1926), which combines the Faust legend with a doppelgänger, or double, motif. In addition to winning international prestige for German films, Expressionism produced two directors who would become major figures in world cinema, Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau.

Lang had already directed several successful serials, including Die Spinnen (The Spiders, 1919–20), when he collaborated with his future wife, the scriptwriter Thea von Harbou, to produce Der müde Tod (“The Weary Death”; English title: Destiny; , 1921) for Decla-Bioskop. This episodic Romantic allegory of doomed lovers, set in several different historical periods, earned Lang acclaim for his dynamic compositions of architectural line and space. Lang’s use of striking, stylized images is also demonstrated in the other films of his Expressionist period, notably the crime melodrama Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922), the Wagnerian diptych Siegfried (1922–24) and Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge, 1922–23), and the stunningly futuristic Metropolis (1926), perhaps the greatest science-fiction film ever made. After directing the early sound masterpiece M (1931), based on child murders in DusseldorfDüsseldorf, Lang became increasingly estranged from German political life. He emigrated in 1933 to escape the Nazis and began a second career in the Hollywood studios the following year.

F.W. Murnau made several minor Expressionist films before directing one of the movement’s classics, an (unauthorized) adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula entitled Nosferatu—eine Symphonie des Grauens (“Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror,” 1922), but it was Der letzte Mann (“The Last Man”; English title: The Last Laugh; , 1924), a film in the genre of Kammerspiel (“intimate theatre”), that made him world-famous. Scripted by Carl Mayer and produced by Erich Pommer for UFA, Der letzte Mann told the story of a hotel doorman who is humiliated by the loss of his job and—more important, apparently, in postwar German society—of his splendid paramilitary uniform. Murnau and Karl Freund, his cameraman, gave this simple tale a complex narrative structure through their innovative use of camera movement and subjective point-of-view shots. In one famous example, Freund strapped a lightweight camera to his chest and stumbled drunkenly around the set of a bedroom to record the inebriated porter’s point of view. In the absence of modern cranes and dollies, at various points in the filming Murnau and Freund placed the camera on moving bicycles, fire engine ladders, and overhead cables in order to achieve smooth, sustained movement. The total effect was a tapestry of subjectively involving movement and intense identification with the narrative. Even more remarkably, the film conveyed its meaning without using any printed intertitles for dialogue or explanation.

Der letzte Mann was universally hailed as a masterpiece and probably had more influence on Hollywood style than any other single foreign film in history. Its “unchained camera” technique (Mayer’s phrase) spawned many imitations in Germany and elsewhere, the most significant being E.A. Dupont’s circus-tent melodrama Variété (1925). The film also brought Murnau a long-term Hollywood contract, which he began to fulfill in 1927 after completing two last “super-productions“superproductions,” Tartüff (Tartuffe, 1925) and Faust (1926), for UFA.

In 1924 the German mark was stabilized by the so-called Dawes Plan, which financed the long-term payment of Germany’s war-reparations debt and curtailed all exports. This created an artificial prosperity in the economy at large, which lasted only until the stock market crash of 1929, but it was devastating to the film industry, the bulk of whose revenues came from foreign markets. Hollywood then seized the opportunity to cripple its only serious European rival, saturating Germany with American films and buying its independent theatre chains. As a result of these forays and its own internal mismanagement, UFA stood on the brink of bankruptcy by the end of 1925. It was saved by a $4 million loan offered by two major American studios, Famous Players–Lasky (later Paramount) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in exchange for collaborative rights to UFA studios, theatres, and creative personnel. This arrangement resulted in the founding of the Parufamet (Paramount-UFA-Metro) Distribution Company in early 1926 and the almost immediate emigration of UFA film artists and technicians to Hollywood, where they worked for a variety of studios. This first Germanic migration was temporary. Many of the filmmakers returned went back to UFA disgusted at the assembly-line character of the American studio system, but many—such as Ernst Lubitsch, Freund, Murnau, and Hungarian-born Mihály Kertész (Michael Curtiz)—stayed and Murnau—stayed on to launch full-fledged Hollywood careers, and many more would come back return during the 1930s to escape the Nazi regime.

In the meantime, the new sensibility that had entered German intellectual life turned away from the morbid psychological themes of Expressionism toward an acceptance of “life as it is lived.” Called die neue Sachlichkeit (“the new objectivity”), this spirit stemmed from the economic dislocations that beset German society in the wake of the war, particularly the impoverishment of the middle classes through raging inflation. In cinema, die neue Sachlichkeit translated into the grim social realism of the “street” films of the late 1920s, including G.W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925), Bruno Rahn’s Dirnentragödie (Tragedy of the Streets, 1927), Joe May’s Asphalt (1929), and Piel Jutzi’s Berlin-Alexanderplatz (1931). Named for their prototype, Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (The Street, 1923), these films focused on the disillusionment, cynicism, and ultimate resignation of ordinary German people whose lives were crippled during the postwar inflation.

The master of the form was G.W. Pabst, whose work established conventions of continuity editing that would become essential to the sound film. In such important realist films as Die freudlose Gasse, Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, 1927), Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929), and Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl, 1929), Pabst created complex continuity sequences, using techniques that became key features of Hollywood’s “invisible” editing style, such as cutting on action, cutting from a shot of a character’s glance to one of what the character sees (motivated point-of-view shots), and cutting to a reverse angle shot (one in which the camera angle has changed 180 degrees; e.g., in a scene in which a man and a woman face one another in conversation, the man is seen from the woman’s point of view, and then the woman is shown from the man’s point of view). Pabst later became an important figure of the early sound period, contributing two significant works in his pacifist films Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft (“Comradeship,” 1931). A few years later, however, Pabst found himself making films for the Nazis, a condition that afflicted the entire German film industry after 1933Emigrating from Germany after the Nazis seized power in 1933, Pabst worked in France and briefly in Hollywood. He returned to Germany in 1941 and made several films for the Nazi-controlled film industry during World War II.

By March 1927, UFA was once again facing financial collapse, and it turned this time to the Prussian financier Alfred Hugenberg, a director of the powerful Krupp industrial empire and a leader of the right-wing German National Party who was sympathetic to the Nazis. Hugenberg bought out the American interests in UFA, acquiring a majority of the company’s stock and directing the remainder into the hands of his political allies. As chairman of the UFA board, he quietly instituted a nationalistic production policy that gave increasing prominence to them those allies and their cause and that enabled the Nazis to subvert the German film industry when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. German cinema then fell under the authority of Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. For the next 12 years every film made in the Third Reich had to be personally approved for release by Goebbels. Jews were officially banned from the industry, causing which caused a vast wave of German film artists to emigrate to leave for Hollywood. Los Angeles became known as “the new Weimar,” and the German cinema was emptied of the talent and brilliance that had created its golden age.

The Soviet Union

Before During the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Russia for all practical purposes had no native film industry. In the industrialized nations of the West, motion pictures had first been accepted as a form of cheap recreation and leisure for the working class. From that base, they had reached out successfully to the middle class and gained wide popularity among all classes by about 1914. In prerevolutionary Russia, however, the working class was composed largely of serfs too poor to support a native industry, and the small movie business that did develop was dominated by foreign interests and foreign films—mainly French, German, and Danish.The first native Russian company was not founded until 1908, and by the time of the Revolution there were perhaps 20 more; but even these were small, importing all their technical equipment and film stock from Germany and Francedecades of the Soviet Union’s existence, the history of cinema in pre-Soviet Russia was a neglected subject, if not actively suppressed. In subsequent years, scholars have brought to light and reevaluated a small but vigorous film culture in the pre-World War I era. Some 4,000 motion-picture theatres were in operation, with the French company Pathé playing a substantial role in production and distribution. Meanwhile, Russian filmmakers such as Yevgeny Bauer had developed a sophisticated style marked by artful lighting and decor.

When Russia entered World War I in August 1914, foreign films could no longer be imported, and the tsarist government established the Skobelev Committee to stimulate domestic production and produce propaganda in support of the regime. The committee had little immediate effect, but, when the tsar fell in March 1917, the Provisional Government, headed by Aleksandr F. Kerensky, reorganized it to produce antitsarist propaganda. When the Bolsheviks inherited the committee eight months later, they transformed it into the Cinema Committee of the People’s Commissariat of Education.

A minority party with approximately 200,000 members, the Bolsheviks had assumed the leadership of 160 million people who were scattered across the largest continuous landmass in the world, spoke more than 100 separate languages, and were mostly illiterate. Vladimir Ilich Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders looked on the motion-picture medium as a means of unifying the huge, disparate nation. Lenin was the first political leader of the 20th century to recognize both the importance of film as propaganda and its power to communicate quickly and effectively. He understood that audiences did not require literacy to comprehend a film’s meaning and that more people could be reached through mass-distributed motion pictures than through any other medium of the time. Lenin declared: “The cinema is for us the most important of the arts,” and his government gave top priority to the rapid development of the Soviet film industry, which was nationalized in August 1919 and put under the direct authority of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

There was, however, little to build upon. Most of the prerevolutionary producers had fled to Europe, wrecking their studios as they left and taking their equipment and film stock with them, wrecking their studios as they left. A foreign blockade prevented the importation of new equipment or stock (there were no domestic facilities for manufacturing either), and massive power shortages restricted the use of what limited resources remained. The Cinema Committee was not deterred, however; its first act was to found a professional film school in Moscow to train directors, technicians, and actors for the cinema.

The Vsesoyuznyi Gosudarstvenyi Institut Kinematografii (VGIK; “All-Union State Institute of Cinematography”) was the first such school in the world and is still among the most respected. Initially it trained people in the production of agitki, existing newsreels reedited for the purpose of agitation and propaganda (agitprop). The agitki were transported on specially equipped agit-trains and agit-steamers to the provinces, where they were exhibited to generate support for the Revolution. (The state-controlled Cuban cinema used the same tactic after the revolution of 1959.) In fact, during the abysmal years of the Russian Civil War (1918–20), nearly all Soviet films were agitki of some sort. Most of the great directors of the Soviet silent cinema were trained in that form, although, having very little technical equipment and no negative film stock, they were often required to make “films without celluloid.”

Students at the VGIK were instructed to write, direct, and act out scenarios as if they were before cameras. Then—on paper—they assembled various “shots” into completed “films.” The great teacher Lev Kuleshov obtained a print of Griffith’s Intolerance and screened it for students in his “Kuleshov workshop” until they had memorized its shot structures and could rearrange its multilayered editing sequences on paper in hundreds of different combinations.

Kuleshov further experimented with editing by intercutting the same shot of a famous actor’s expressionless face with several different shots of highly expressive content—a steaming bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin, and a little girl playing with a teddy bear. The invariable response of film school audiences when shown these sequences was that the actor’s face assumed the emotion appropriate to the intercut object—hunger for the soup, sorrow for the dead woman, paternal affection for the little girl. Kuleshov reasoned from this phenomenon, known today as the “Kuleshov effect,” that the shot in film always has two values: that which the one it carries in itself as a photographic image of reality , and that which the one it acquires when placed into juxtaposition with another shot. He reasoned further that the second value is more important to cinematic signification than the first and that , therefore, time and space in the cinema must therefore be subordinate to the process of editing, or “montage” (coined by the Soviets from the French verb monter, “to assemble”). Kuleshov ultimately conceived of montage as an expressive process whereby dissimilar images could be linked together to create nonliteral or symbolic meaning.

Although Kuleshov made several important films, including Po zakonu (By the Law, 1926), it was as a teacher and theorist that he most deeply influenced an entire generation of Soviet directors. Two of his most brilliant students were Sergey Eisenstein and Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin.

Eisenstein was, with Griffith, one of the great pioneering geniuses of the modern cinema, and like his predecessor he produced a handful of enduring masterworks. Griffith, however, had elaborated the structure of narrative editing intuitively, whereas Eisenstein was an intellectual who formulated a modernist theory of editing based on the psychology of perception and Marxist dialectic. Trained He was trained as a civil engineer, but in 1920 he joined the Moscow Proletkult Theatre, where he fell under the influence of the stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold and directed a number of plays in the revolutionary style of Futurism. In the winter of 1922–23 Eisenstein studied under Kuleshov and was inspired to write his first theoretical manifesto, The Montage of Attractions. Published in the radical journal Lef, the article advocated assaulting an audience with calculated emotional shocks for the purpose of agitation.

Eisenstein was invited to direct the Proletkult-sponsored film Stachka (Strike) in 1924, but, like Griffith, he knew little of the practical aspects of production. He therefore enlisted the aid of Eduard Tisse, a brilliant cinematographer at the state-owned Goskino studios, beginning a lifelong artistic collaboration. Strike is a semidocumentary representation of the brutal suppression of a strike by tsarist factory owners and police. In addition to being Eisenstein’s first film, it was also the first revolutionary mass-film of the new Soviet state. Conceived as an extended montage of shock stimuli, the film concludes with the now famous sequence in which the massacre of the strikers and their families is intercut with shots of cattle being slaughtered in an abattoir.

Strike was an immediate success, and Eisenstein was next commissioned to direct a film celebrating the 20th anniversary of the failed 1905 Revolution against tsarism. Originally intended to provide a panorama of the entire event, the project eventually came to focus on a single representative episode—the mutiny of the battleship Potemkin and the massacre of the citizens of the port of Odessa by tsarist troops. Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925) emerged as one of the most important and influential films ever made, especially in Eisenstein’s use of montage, which had improved far beyond the formulaic, if effective, juxtapositions of Strike.

Although agitational to the core, Battleship Potemkin is a work of extraordinary pictorial beauty and great elegance of form. It is symmetrically broken into five movements or acts, according to the structure of Greek tragedy. In the first of these, “Men and Maggots,” the flagrant mistreatment of the sailors at the hands of their officers is demonstrated, while the second, “Drama on the Quarterdeck,” presents the actual mutiny and the ship’s arrival in Odessa. “Appeal from the Dead” establishes the solidarity of the citizens of Odessa with the mutineers, but it is the fourth sequence, “The Odessa Steps,” which depicts the massacre of the citizens, that thrust Eisenstein and his film into the historical eminence that both occupy today. Its power is such that the film’s conclusion, “Meeting the Squadron,” in which the Battleship Potemkin in a show of brotherhood is allowed to pass through the squadron unharmed, is anticlimactic.

Unquestionably the most famous sequence of its kind in film history, “The Odessa Steps” incarnates the theory of dialectical montage that Eisenstein later expounded in his collected writings, The Film Sense (1942) and Film Form (1949). Eisenstein believed that meaning in motion pictures is generated by the collision of opposing shots. Building on Kuleshov’s ideas, Eisenstein reasoned that montage operates according to the Marxist view of history as a perpetual conflict in which a force (thesis) and a counterforce (antithesis) collide to produce a totally new and greater phenomenon (synthesis). He compared this dialectical process in film editing to “the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving forward its automobile or tractor.” The force of “The Odessa Steps” arises when the viewer’s mind combines individual, independent shots and forms a new, distinct conceptual impression that far outweighs the shots’ narrative significance. Through Eisenstein’s accelerated manipulations of filmic time and space, the slaughter on the stone steps—where hundreds of citizens find themselves trapped between descending tsarist militia above and Cossacks below—acquires a powerful symbolic meaning. With the addition of a stirring revolutionary score by the German Marxist composer Edmund Meisel, the agitational appeal of Battleship Potemkin became nearly irresistible, and, when exported in early 1926, it made Eisenstein world-famous.

Eisenstein’s next project, Oktyabr (October, 1928), was commissioned by the Central Committee to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Accordingly, vast resources, including the Soviet army and navy, were placed at the director’s disposal. Eisenstein based the shooting script on voluminous documentary material from the era and on John Reed’s book Ten Days That Shook the World. When the film was completed in November 1927, it was just under four hours long. While Eisenstein was making October, however, Joseph Stalin had taken control of the Politburo from Leon Trotsky, and the director was forced to cut the print by one-third to eliminate references to the exiled Trotsky.

Eisenstein had consciously used October as a laboratory for experimenting with “intellectual” or “ideological” montage, an abstract type of editing in which the relationships established between shots are conceptual rather than visual or emotional. When the film was finally released, however, Stalinist critics attacked this alleged “formalist excess” (aestheticism or elitism). The same charge was leveled even more bitterly against Eisenstein’s next film, Staroe i novoe (Old and New, 1929), which Stalinist bureaucrats completely disavowed. Stalin hated Eisenstein because he was an intellectual and a Jew, but the director’s international stature was such that he could not be publicly purged. Instead, Stalin used the Soviet state-subsidy apparatus to foil Eisenstein’s projects and attack his principles at every turn, a situation that resulted in the director’s failure to complete another film until Alexander Nevsky was commissioned in 1938.

Eisenstein’s nearest rival in the Soviet silent cinema was his fellow student Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin. Like Eisenstein, Pudovkin developed a new theory of montage, but one based on cognitive linkage rather than dialectical collision. He maintained that “the film is not shot, but built, built up from the separate strips of celluloid that are its raw material.” Pudovkin, like Griffith, most often used montage for narrative rather than symbolic purpose. His films are more personal than Eisenstein’s; the epic drama that is the focus of Eisenstein’s films exists in Pudovkin’s films merely to provide a backdrop for the interplay of human emotions.

Pudovkin’s major work is Mat (Mother, 1926), a tale of strikebreaking and terrorism in which a woman loses first her husband and then her son to the opposing sides of the 1905 Revolution. The film was internationally acclaimed for the innovative intensity of its montage, as well as for its emotion and lyricism. Pudovkin’s later films include Konets Sankt-Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg, 1927), which, like Eisenstein’s October, was commissioned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Potomok Chingis-Khana (The Heir to Genghis Khan, or Storm over Asia, 1928), which is set in Central Asia during the Russian Civil War. Both mingle human drama with the epic and the symbolic as they tell a story of a politically naive person who is galvanized into action by tsarist tyranny. Although Pudovkin was never persecuted as severely by the Stalinists as Eisenstein, he , too , was publicly charged with formalism for his experimental sound film Prostoi sluchai (A Simple Case, 1932), which he was forced to release without its sound track. Pudovkin made several more sound films but remains best known for his silent work.

Two other seminal figures of the Soviet silent era were Aleksandr Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov (original name Denis Kaufman). Dovzhenko, the son of Ukrainian peasants, had been a political cartoonist and painter before becoming a director at the state-controlled Odessa studios in 1926. After several minor works, he made Zvenigora (1928), a collection of boldly stylized tales about a hunt for an ancient Scythian treasure set during four different stages of Ukrainian history; Arsenal (1929), an epic film poem about the effects of revolution and civil war upon the Ukraine; and Zemlya (Earth, 1930), which is considered to be his masterpiece. Earth tells the story of the conflict between a family of wealthy landowning peasants (kulaks) and the young peasants of a collective farm in a small Ukrainian village, but the film is less a narrative than a lyric hymn to the cyclic recurrence of birth, life, love, and death in nature and in humankind. Although the film is acclaimed today, when it was released, Stalinist critics denounced it as counterrevolutionary. Soon after, Dovzhenko entered a period of political eclipse, during which, however, he continued to make films.

Dziga Vertov (a pseudonym meaning “spinning top”) was an artist of quite different talents. He began his career as an agitki photographer and newsreel editor and is now acknowledged as the father of cinema verité (a self-consciously realistic documentary movement of the 1960s and ’70s) for his development and practice of the theory of the kino-glaz (“cinema-eye”). Vertov articulated this doctrine in the early 1920s in a number of radical manifestos in which he denounced conventional narrative cinema as impotent and demanded that it be replaced with a cinema of actuality based on the “organization of camera-recorded documentary material.” Between 1922 and 1925, he put his idea into practice in a series of 23 carefully crafted newsreel-documentaries entitled Kino-pravda (“film truth”) and Goskinokalender. Vertov’s most famous film is Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), a feature-length portrait of Moscow from dawn to dusk. The film plays upon the “city symphony” genre inaugurated by Walter Ruttman’s Ruttmann’s Berlin, the Symphony of a Great City (1927), but Vertov repeatedly draws attention to the filmmaking process to create an autocritique of cinema itself.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Vertov welcomed the coming of sound, envisioning it as a “radio-ear” to accompany the “cinema-eye.” His first sound film, Entuziazm—simfoniya Donbassa (Symphony of the Donbas, 1931), was an extraordinary contribution to the new medium, as was Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs About Lenin, 1934), yet Vertov could not escape the charge of formalist error any more than his peers. Although he did make the feature film Kolybelnaya (Lullaby) in 1937, for the most part the Stalinist establishment reduced him to the status of a newsreel photographer after 1934.

Many other Soviet filmmakers played important roles in the great decade of experiment that followed the Revolution, among them Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, Boris Barnet, Yakov Protazanov, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Abram Room, and the documentarian Esther Shub. The period came to an abrupt end in 1929, when Stalin removed the state film trust (then called Sovkino) from the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Education and placed it under the direct authority of the Supreme Council of the National Economy. Reorganized as Soyuzkino, the trust was turned over to the reactionary bureaucrat Boris Shumyatsky, a proponent of the narrowly ideological doctrine known as Socialist Realism. This policy, which came to dominate the Soviet arts, dictated that individual creativity be subordinated to the political aims of the party and the state. In practice, it militated against the symbolic, the experimental, and the avant-garde in favour of a literal-minded “people’s art” that glorified representative Soviet heroes and idealized Soviet experience. The restraints imposed made it impossible for the great filmmakers of the postrevolutionary era to produce creative or innovative work, and the Soviet cinema went into decline.

Post-World War I American cinema

During the 1920s in the United States, motion-picture production, distribution, and exhibition became a major national industry and movies perhaps the major national obsession. The salaries of stars reached monumental proportions, ; filmmaking practices and narrative formulas were standardized to accommodate mass production, ; and Wall Street began to invest heavily in every branch of the business. The growing industry was organized according to the studio system that, in many respects, the producer Thomas Harper Ince had developed between 1914 and 1918 at Inceville, his studio in the Santa Ynez Canyon near Hollywood. Ince functioned as the central authority over multiple production units, each headed by a director who was required to shoot an assigned film according to a detailed continuity script. Every project was carefully budgeted and tightly scheduled, and Ince himself supervised the final cut. This central producer system was the prototype for the studio system of the 1920s, and, with some modification, it prevailed as the dominant mode of Hollywood production for the next 40 years.

Virtually all the major film genres evolved and were codified during the 1920s, but none was more characteristic of the period than the slapstick comedy. This form was originated by Mack Sennett, who, at his Keystone Studios, produced countless one- and two-reel shorts and features (Tillie’s Punctured Romance, 1914; The Surf Girl, 1916; Teddy at the Throttle, 1917) whose narrative logic was subordinated to fantastic, purely visual humour. An anarchic mixture of circus, vaudeville, burlesque, pantomime, and the chase, Sennett’s Keystone comedies created a world of inspired madness and mayhem, and they employed the talents of such future stars as Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon, Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Harold Lloyd. When these performers achieved fame, many of them left Keystone, often to form their own production companies, a practice still possible in the early 1920s.

Chaplin, for example, who had developed the persona of the “Little Tramp” at Keystone, went on to direct and star in a series of shorts produced by Essanay in 1915 (The Tramp, A Night in the Show) and Mutual between 1916 and 1917 (The Vagabond, One A.M., The Rink, Easy Street). In 1917 he was offered an eight-film contract with First National that enabled him to establish his own studio. He directed his first feature there, the semiautobiographical The Kid (1921), but most of his First National films were two-reelers. In 1919 Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, the four most popular and powerful film artists of the time, jointly formed the United Artists Corporation in order to produce and distribute—and thereby retain artistic and financial control over—their own films. Chaplin directed three silent features for United Artists: A Woman of Paris (1923), his great comic epic The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus (1928), which was released after the introduction of sound into motion pictures. He later made several sound films, but the two most successful—his first two, City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936)—were essentially silent films with musical scores.

Buster Keaton possessed a very different kind of comic talent than Chaplin; very different from Chaplin’s, but both men were wonderfully subtle actors with a keen sense of the tragic often contained within the comic, and both were major directors of their period. Keaton, like Chaplin, was born into a theatrical family and began performing in vaudeville skits at a young age. Intrigued by the new film medium, he left the stage and worked for two years as a supporting comedian for Arbuckle’s production company. In 1919 Keaton formed his own production company, where over the next four years he made 20 shorts (including One Week, 1920; The Boat, 1921; Cops, 1922; and The Balloonatic, 1923) that represent, with Chaplin’s Mutual films, the acme of American slapstick comedy. A Keaton trademark was the “trajectory gag,” in which perfect timing of acting, directing, and editing propels his film character through a geometric progression of complicated sight gags that seem impossibly dangerous but are still dramatically logical. Such routines inform all of Keaton’s major features—Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), and his masterpieces The General (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). Keaton’s greatest films, all made before his company was absorbed by MGM, have a reflexive quality that indicates his fascination with film as a medium. Although some of his MGM films were financially successful, the factory-like studio system stifled Keaton’s creativity, and he was reduced to playing bit parts after the early 1930s.

Important but lesser silent comics were Lloyd, the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Langdon, and Arbuckle. Working at the Hal Roach Studios, Lloyd cultivated the persona of an earnest, sweet-tempered boy-next-door. He specialized in a variant of Keystone mayhem known as the “comedy of thrills,” in which—as in Lloyd’s most famous features, Safety Last (1923) and The Freshman (1925)—an innocent protagonist finds himself placed in physical danger. Laurel and Hardy also worked for Roach. They made 27 silent two-reelers, including Putting Pants on Philip (1927) and Liberty (1929), and became even more popular in the 1930s in such sound films as Another Fine Mess (1930) and Sons of the Desert (1933). Their comic characters were basically grown-up children whose relationship was sometimes disturbingly sadomasochistic. Langdon also traded on a childlike, even babylike, image in such popular features as The Strong Man (1926) and Long Pants (1927), both directed by Frank Capra. Arbuckle, however, in his few years of stardom, created the character of a leering, sensual adult. Arbuckle’s talent was limited, but his persona affected the course of American film history in a quite unexpected way.

By the early 1920s some 40 million Americans—half of them minors—were attending the movies each week. The rapid spread of the medium and its easy accessibility had already caused mild public concern, especially because films had begun to feature increasingly risqué plots and situations. Concern increased as Hollywood became identified in the popular mind with the materialism, cynicism, and sexual license of the Jazz Age. Then in September 1921 the popular Arbuckle was charged with the rape and manslaughter of a young starlet, and the concern turned into anger and rage. Arbuckle was eventually exonerated, but other Hollywood scandals surfaced—e.g., the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, the death from drug addiction of matinee idol Wallace Reid—and the tabloid press screamed for blood.

In an attempt to stave off probable mass boycotts and government censorship, in March 1922 the studio heads formed a self-regulatory trade organizationArbuckle was at the centre of the most damaging scandal to affect American motion pictures during the silent era. In September 1921 the comedian and several friends hosted a weekend party in a San Francisco hotel. During the party a woman became ill, and she later died in a hospital of peritonitis. Press reports of the event as a drunken orgy inflamed public opinion. Amid the volatile social transformations of the post-World War I era, with issues such as immigration restriction and the national prohibition of alcoholic beverages deeply dividing the country, many had come to regard motion pictures as a disturbing instigator of social change and its high-living stars as threats to moral order and values. The Arbuckle scandal seemed to encapsulate these fears, and prosecutors responded by accusing the actor of rape and murder. Eventually indicted for manslaughter, he was tried three times; the first two trials ended in hung juries, and in the third the jury deliberated for six minutes and voted for acquittal. But Arbuckle’s career as an actor was in ruins, and he was banned from the screen for more than a decade. Other sensational deaths involving Hollywood personalities, through murder or suicide or drug overdose, fueled the public furor.

To stave off increasing efforts by state and local governments to censor motion pictures, the Hollywood studios formed a new, stronger trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA; later renamed the Motion Picture Association of America), and hired the . They also hired a conservative politician, U.S. postmaster general, Postmaster General Will H. Hays, to as its head it. In practice, the The Hays Office, as the MPPDA was association became popularly known, functioned advocated industry self-regulation as an advisory body and engaged in little actual censorship. It promulgated an unenforceable “Purity Code,” which was facetiously called the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls,” and it endorsed a policy of “compensating values,” whereby all manner of screen vileness could be depicted so long as it was shown to be punished by the film’s end. Throughout the 1920s the Hays Office primarily (and successfully) served to mollify pressure groups and to manage public relationsalternative to governmental interference, and it succeeded in preventing the expansion of censorship efforts. Hays promulgated a series of documents that attempted to regulate various forms of criminal and immoral behaviour depicted in motion pictures. A principle such as “compensating values,” for example, recognized that popular entertainment had always told stories of lawbreaking and social transgression, but it held that law and morality should always triumph in a film.

The leading practitioner of the compensating values formula was the flamboyant director Cecil B. DeMille. He first became famous after World War I for a series of sophisticated comedies of manners that were aimed at Hollywood’s new middle-class audience (Old Wives for New, 1918; Forbidden Fruit, 1921). When the Hays Office was established, DeMille turned to the sex- and violence-drenched religious spectacles that made him an international figure, notably The Ten Commandments (1923; remade 1956). DeMille’s chief rival in the production of stylish sex comedies was the German émigré Ernst Lubitsch. An early master of the UFA Kostümfilm, Lubitsch excelled at sexual innuendo and understatement in such urbane essays as The Marriage Circle (1924). Also popular during the 1920s were the swashbuckling exploits of Douglas Fairbanks, whose lavish adventure spectacles, including Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), thrilled a generation, and the narrative documentaries of Robert Flaherty, whose Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926) were unexpectedly successful with the public and with critics.

The most enigmatic and unconventional figure working in Hollywood at the time, however, was without a doubt the Viennese émigré Erich von Stroheim. Stroheim, who also acted, learned directing as an assistant to Griffith on Intolerance and Hearts of the World. His first three films—Blind Husbands (1918), The Devil’s Passkey (1919), and Foolish Wives (1922)—constitute an obsessive trilogy of adultery; each features a sexual triangle in which an American wife is seduced by a Prussian army officer. Even though all three films were enormously popular, the great sums Stroheim was spending on the extravagant production design and costuming of his next project brought him into conflict with his Universal producers, and he was replaced.

Stroheim then signed a contract with Goldwyn Pictures and began work on a long-cherished project—an adaptation of Frank Norris’s grim , naturalistic novel McTeague. Shot entirely on location in the streets and rooming houses of San Francisco, in Death Valley, and in the California hills, the film was conceived as a sentence-by-sentence translation of its source. Stroheim’s original version ran approximately 10 hours. Realizing that the film was too long to be exhibited, he cut almost half of the footage. The film was still deemed too long, so Stroheim, with the help of director Rex Ingram, edited it down into a four-hour version that could be shown in two parts. By that time, however, Goldwyn Pictures had merged with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to become MGM. MGM took the negative from Stroheim and cut another two hours, destroying the excised footage in the process. Released as Greed (1924), the film had enormous gaps in continuity, but it was still recognized as a work of genius in its rich psychological characterization and in its creation of a naturalistic analogue for the novel.

Stroheim made one more film for MGM, a darkly satiric adaptation of the Franz Lehár operetta The Merry Widow (1925). He then went to Celebrity Pictures, where he directed The Wedding March (1928), a two-part spectacle set in imperial Vienna, but his work was taken from him and recut into a single film when Celebrity was absorbed by Paramount. Stroheim’s last directorial duties were on the botched Queen Kelly (1929) and Walking Down down Broadway (1932), although he was removed from both films for various reasons. He made his living thereafter by writing screenplays and acting.

Although many of Stroheim’s troubles with Hollywood were personal, he was also a casualty of the American film industry’s transformation during the 1920s from a speculative entrepreneurial enterprise into a vertically and horizontally integrated oligopoly that had no tolerance for creative difference. His situation was not unique; many singular artists, including Griffith, Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton, found it difficult to survive as filmmakers under the rigidly standardized studio system that had been established by the end of the decade. The industry’s conversion to sound at that time reinforced its big-business tendencies and further discouraged independent filmmakers. The studios, which had borrowed huge sums of money on the very brink of the Great Depression in order to finance the conversion, were determined to reduce production costs and increase efficiency. They therefore became less and less willing to tolerate artistic innovation or eccentricity.

The pre-World War II sound era
Introduction of sound

The idea of combining motion pictures and sound had been around since the invention of the cinema itself: Thomas Edison had commissioned the Kinetograph to provide visual images for his phonograph, and William Dickson had actually synchronized the two machines in a device briefly marketed in the 1890s as the Kinetophone. Léon Gaumont’s Chronophone in France and Cecil Hepworth’s Vivaphone system in England employed a similar technology, and each was used to produce hundreds of synchronized shorts between 1902 and 1912. In Germany , producer-director Oskar Messter began to release all of his films with recorded musical scores as early as 1908. By the time the feature had become the dominant film form in the West, producers regularly commissioned orchestral scores to accompany prestigious productions, and virtually all films were accompanied by cue sheets suggesting appropriate musical selections for performance during exhibition.

Actual recorded sound required amplification for sustained periods of use, however, which became possible only after Lee De Forest’s perfection in 1907 of the Audion tube, a three-element, or triode, vacuum tube that magnified sound and drove it through speakers so that it could be heard by a large audience. In 1919 De Forest developed an optical sound-on-film process patented as Phonofilm, and between 1923 and 1927 he made more than 1,000 synchronized sound shorts for release to specially wired theatres. The public was widely interested in these films, but the major Hollywood producers, to whom De Forest vainly tried to sell his system, were not: they viewed “talking pictures” as an expensive novelty with little potential return.

By that time, Western Electric, the manufacturing subsidiary of American Telephone & Telegraph Company, had perfected a sophisticated sound-on-disc system called Vitaphone, which their representatives attempted to market to Hollywood in 1925. Like De Forest, they were rebuffed by the major studios, but Warner Brothers, then a minor studio in the midst of aggressive expansion, bought both the system and the right to sublease it to other producers. Warner Brothers had no more faith in talking pictures than did the major studios but thought that the novelty could be exploited for short-term profits. The studio planned to use Vitaphone to provide synchronized orchestral accompaniment for all Warner Brothers films, thereby enhancing their marketability to second- and third-run exhibitors who could not afford to hire live orchestral accompaniment. After mounting a $3 million promotion, Warner Brothers debuted the system on August Aug. 6, 1926, with Don Juan, a lavish costume drama starring John Barrymore, directed by Alan Crosland, and featuring a score performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The response was enthusiastic; Warner Brothers announced that all of its films for 1927 would be released with synchronized musical accompaniment and then turned immediately to the production of its second Vitaphone feature. The Jazz Singer (1927), also directed by Crosland, included popular songs and incidental dialogue in addition to the orchestral score; its phenomenal success virtually ensured the industry’s conversion to sound.

Sensing that Warner Brothers’ gamble on sound might pay off, MGM, First National, Paramount, and others had asked the MPPDA to investigate competing sound systems in early 1927. There were several sound-on-film systems that were technologically superior to Vitaphone, but the rights to most of them were owned by William Fox, president of Fox Film Corporation. Fox, like the Warners, had seen sound as a way of cornering the market among smaller exhibitors. Therefore, in the summer of 1926, he acquired the rights to the Case-Sponable sound-on-film system (whose similarity to De Forest’s Phonofilm was the subject of subsequent patent litigation) and formed the Fox-Case Corporation to make shorts under the trade name Fox Movietone. Six months later he secretly bought the American rights to the German Tri-Ergon process, whose flywheel mechanism was essential to the continuous reproduction of optical sound. To cover himself completely Fox negotiated a reciprocal pact between Fox-Case and Vitaphone under which each licensed the other to use its sound systems, equipment, and personnel. The sound-on-film system eventually prevailed over sound-on-disc because it enabled image and sound to be recorded simultaneously in the same (photographic) medium, ensuring their precise and automatic synchronization.

Despite Warner Brothers’ obvious success with sound films, film industry leaders were not eager to lease sound equipment from a direct competitor. They banded together, and Warner Brothers was forced to give up its rights to the Vitaphone system in exchange for a share in any new royalties earned. The major film companies then wasted no time. By May 1928 virtually every studio in Hollywood, major and minor, was licensed by Western Electric’s newly created marketing subsidiary, Electrical Research Products, Incorporated (ERPI), to use Western Electric equipment with the Movietone sound-on-film recording system. ERPI’s monopoly did not please the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which had tried to market a sound-on-film system that had been developed in the laboratories of its parent company, General Electric, and had been patented in 1925 as RCA Photophone. In October 1928 , RCA therefore acquired the Keith-Albee-Orpheum vaudeville circuit and merged it with Joseph P. Kennedy’s Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) to form RKO Radio Pictures for the express purpose of producing sound films using the Photophone system (which ultimately became the industry standard).

Conversion to sound

The wholesale conversion to sound of all three sectors of the American film industry took place in less than 15 months between late 1927 and 1929, and the profits of the major companies increased during that period by as much as 600 percent. Although the transition was fast, orderly, and profitable, it was also enormously expensive. The industrial system as it had evolved for the previous three decades needed to be completely overhauled; studios and theatres had to be totally reequipped and creative personnel retrained or fired. In order to fund the conversion, the film companies were forced to borrow in excess of $350 million, which placed them under the indirect control of the two major New York-based financial groups, the Morgan group and the Rockefeller group.

Furthermore, although cooperation among between the film companies through such agencies as the MPPDA, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE) ensured a smooth transition in corporate terms, inside the newly wired theatres and studio soundstages there was confusion and disruption. The three competing systems—Vitaphone, Movietone, and Photophone—were all initially incompatible, and their technologies were under such constant modification that equipment was sometimes obsolete before it was uncrated. Whatever system producers chose, exhibitors during the early transitional period were forced to maintain both sound-on-disc and sound-on-film reproduction equipment. Even as late as 1931, studios were still releasing films in both formats to accommodate theatres owned by sound-on-disc interests.

It was in the area of production, however, that the greatest problems arose. The statement that “the movies ceased to move when they began to talk” accurately described the films made during the earliest years of the transition, largely because of technical limitations. Early microphones, for example, had a very limited range. In addition, they were large, clumsy, and difficult to move, so that they were usually concealed in a single, stationary location on the set. The actors, who had to speak directly into the microphones to register on the sound track, were therefore forced to remain practically motionless while delivering dialogue. The microphones caused further problems because they were omnidirectional within their range and picked up every sound made near them on the set, especially the noisy whir of running cameras (which were motorized in 1929 to run at an even speed of 24 frames per second to ensure undistorted sound synchronization; silent cameras had been mainly hand-cranked at rates averaging 16 to 18 frames per second). To prevent the recording of camera noise, cameras and their operators were initially enclosed in soundproof glass-paneled booths that were only 6 feet (2 metres) long per side. The booths, which were facetiously called “iceboxes” because they were uncomfortably hot and stuffy, literally imprisoned the camera. The filmmakers’ inability to tilt or dolly the camera (although they could pan it by as much as 30 degrees on its tripod), combined with the actors’ immobility, helps to account for the static nature of so many early sound films.

The impact of sound recording on editing was even more regressive, because sound and image had to be recorded simultaneously to be synchronous. In sound-on-disc films, scenes were initially made to play for 10 minutes at a time in order to record dialogue continuously on 16-inch (41-cm) discs; such scenes were impossible to edit until the technology of rerecording was perfected in the early 1930s. Sound-on-film systems also militated against editing at first because ; optical sound tracks run approximately 20 frames in advance of their corresponding image tracks, making it extremely difficult to cut a composite print without eliminating portions of the relevant sound. As a result, no matter which system of sound recording was used, most of the editing in early sound films was purely functional. In general, cuts could only be made—and the camera moved—when moved—only when no sound was being recorded on the set.

Most of these technical problems were resolved by 1933, although equilibrium was not fully restored to the production process until after the mid-1930s. Sound-on-disc filming, for example, was abandoned in 1930, and by 1931 all the studios had removed their cameras from the iceboxes and converted to the use of lightweight , soundproof camera housings known as “blimps.” Within several years, smaller, quieter, self-insulating cameras were produced, eliminating the need for external soundproofing altogether. It even became possible again to move the camera again by using a wide range of boom cranes, camera supports, and steerable dollies. Microphones , too , became increasingly mobile as a variety of booms were developed for them from 1930 onward. These long radial arms suspended the microphone above the set, allowing it to follow the movements of actors and rendering the stationary microphones of the early years obsolete. Microphones also became more directional throughout the decade, and track noise-suppression techniques came into use as early as 1931.


The technological development that most liberated the sound film, however, was the practice known variously as postsynchronization, rerecording, or dubbing, in which image and sound are printed on separate pieces of film so that they can be manipulated independently. Postsynchronization enabled filmmakers to edit images freely again. Because the overwhelming emphasis of the period from 1928 to 1931 had been on obtaining high-quality sound in production, however, the idea that the sound track could be modified after it was recorded took a while to catch on. Many motion-picture artists and technicians felt that sound should be reproduced in films exactly as it had originally been produced on the set; they believed that anything less than an absolute pairing of sound and image would confuse audiences.

For several years, both practice and ideology dictated that sound and image be recorded simultaneously, so that everything heard on the sound track would be seen on the screen and vice versa. A vocal minority of film artists nevertheless viewed this practice of synchronous, “naturalistic” sound recording as a threat to the cinema. In their 1928 manifesto “Sound and Image,” the Soviet directors Sergey Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigory Aleksandrov denounced synchronous sound in favour of asynchronous, contrapuntal sound—sound that would counterpoint the images it accompanied to become another dynamic element in the montage process. Like the practical editing problem, the theoretical debate over the appropriate use of sound was eventually resolved by the practice of postsynchronization.

Postsynchronization seems to have first been used by the American director King Vidor in the all-black musical Hallelujah (1929) for a sequence in which the hero is chased through Arkansas swamplands in the all-black musical Hallelujah (1929). Vidor shot the action on location without sound, using a freely moving camera. Later, in the studio, he added to the film a separately recorded sound track containing both naturalistic and impressionistic effects. In the following year Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front and G.W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 both used postsynchronization for their battle scenes. Ernst Lubitsch used dubbing in his first American sound films, the dynamic musicals The Love Parade (1929) and Monte Carlo (1930), as did the French director René Clair in Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930). In all these early instances, sound was recorded and rerecorded on a single track, although some American directors, including Milestone and the Russian-born Armenian Rouben Mamoulian (Applause, 1929; City Streets, 1931), had experimented with multiple microphone setups and overlapping dialogue as early as 1929. Generally, through 1932, either dialogue or music dominated the sound track unless they had been simultaneously recorded on the set. In 1933, however, technology was introduced that allowed filmmakers to mix separately recorded tracks for background music, sound effects, and synchronized dialogue at the dubbing stage. By the late 1930s, postsynchronization and multiple-channel mixing had become standard industry procedure.

Nontechnical effects of sound

Other changes wrought by sound were more purely human. Directors, for example, could no longer literally direct their performers while the cameras were rolling and sound was being recorded. Actors and actresses were suddenly required to have pleasant voices and to act without the assistance of mood music or the director’s shouted instructions through long dialogue takes. Many found that they could not learn lines; others tried and were defeated by heavy foreign accents (e.g., Emil Jannings, Pola Negri, Vilma Banky, and Lya de Putti) or voices that did not match their screen image (e.g., Colleen Moore, Corinne Griffith, Norma Talmadge, and John Gilbert). Numerous silent stars were supplanted during the transitional period by stage actors or film actors with stage experience. “Canned theatre,” or literal transcriptions of stage hits, became a dominant Hollywood form between 1929 and 1931, which brought many Broadway players and directors into the film industry on a more or less permanent basis. In addition, to fulfill the unprecedented need for dialogue scripts, the studios imported hundreds of editors, critics, playwrights, and novelists, many of whom would make lasting contributions to the verbal sophistication of the American sound film.

As sound demanded new filmmaking techniques and talents, it also created new genres and renovated old ones. The realism it permitted inspired the emergence of tough, socially pertinent films with urban settings. Crime epics, or gangster films, such as Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1930), William Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931), and Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932), used sound to exploit urban slang and the audible pyrotechnics of the recently invented Thompson submachine gun. Subgenres of the gangster film appeared in were the prison film (e.g., The Big House, 1930; Hawks’s The Criminal Code, 1931; LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 1932) and the newspaper picture (e.g., Milestone’s The Front Page, 1931; LeRoy’s Five Star Final, 1931; John Cromwell’s Scandal Sheet, 1931; Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde, 1931), both of which relied on authentic-sounding vernacular speech.

The public’s fascination with speech also accounted for the new popularity of historical biographies, or “biopics.” These films were modeled on the Universum Film AG’s (UFA’s) silent Kostümfilm, but dialogue enhanced their verisimilitude. Several actors with impressive speaking voices were often associated with the genre, notably George Arliss (Disraeli, 1929; The House of Rothschild, 1934) and Paul Muni (The Life of Emile Zola, 1937; Juarez, 1939) in the United States and Charles Laughton (Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1933, and ; Rembrandt, 1936) in England.

In the realm of comedy, pure slapstick could not and did not survive, predicated as it was on purely visual humour. It was replaced by equally vital—but ultimately less surreal and abstract—sound comedies: the anarchic dialogue comedies of the Marx Brothers (The Cocoanuts, 1929; Animal Crackers, 1930; Monkey Business, 1931; Horse Feathers, 1932; Duck Soup, 1933) and W.C. Fields (The Golf Specialist, 1930; The Dentist, 1932; Million Dollar Legs, 1932) and the fast-paced wisecracking “screwball” comedies of directors such as Frank Capra (Lady for a Day, 1933; It Happened One Night, 1934; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936), Howard Hawks (Twentieth Century, 1934; Bringing Up Baby, 1938), Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey, 1936), Mitchell Leisen (Easy Living, 1937), and Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, 1937).

The horror-fantasy genre, traditionally rooted in German Expressionism, was greatly enhanced by sound, which not only permitted the addition of eerie sound effects but also restored the dimension of literary dialogue present in so many of the original sources. Appropriately, Universal Pictures’ three great horror classics—Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), and Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932)—were all early sound films.

One significant genre whose emergence was obviously contingent upon sound was the musical. Versions of Broadway musicals were among the first sound films made (including, of course, the catalyst for the conversion, Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer), and by the early 1930s the movie musical had developed in formal sophistication to become perhaps the major American genre of the decade. Among the formidable artists who helped to achieve this sophistication were director Ernst Lubitsch at Paramount (The Love Parade, 1929; Monte Carlo, 1930; The Smiling Lieutenant, 1931), dance director Busby Berkeley at Warner Brothers (42nd Street, 1933; Gold Diggers of 1933, 1933; Footlight Parade, 1933; Dames, 1934), and dancer-star Fred Astaire, who choreographed and directed his own integrated dance sequences at RKO (The Gay Divorcee, 1934; Roberta, 1935; Top Hat, 1935; Swing Time, 1936). Ginger Rogers was Astaire’s dancing partner in these and six other films during the 1930s.

Walt Disney pioneered a genre that might be called the animated musical with The Skeleton Dance (1929), the first entry in his “Silly Symphony” series. Unburdened by the awkward logistics of live-action shooting, Disney was free to combine sound and image asynchronously or with perfect frame-by-frame synchronization in such classic cartoons as Steamboat Willie (1928—Mickey Mouse’s debut) and The Three Little Pigs (1933). To enhance their fantasy-like appeal, both the musical and the animated film made early use of the photographic two-colour systems imbibition process introduced by the Technicolor Corporation in 1928, during the conversion to sound (two-colour imbibition, 1928; . Animated films also pioneered the use of Technicolor’s three-colour, three-strip imbibition process, 1932), and the two genres quickly became associated with colour in the public mindintroduced in 1932.

Introduction of colour

Photographic colour entered the cinema at approximately the same time as sound, although, as with sound, various colour effects had been used in films since the invention of the medium. Georges Méliès, for example, employed 21 women at his Montreuil studio to hand-colour his films frame by frame, but hand-colouring was not cost-effective unless films were very short. In the mid-1900s, as films began to approach one reel in length and more prints of each film were sold, mechanized stenciling processes were introduced. In Pathé’s Pathécolor system, for example, a stencil was cut for each colour desired (up to six) and aligned with the print; colour was then applied through the stencil frame by frame at high speeds. With the advent of the feature and the conversion of the industry to mass production during the 1910s, frame-by-frame stenciling was replaced by mechanized tinting and toning. Tinting coloured all the light areas of a picture and was achieved by immersing a black-and-white print in dye or by using coloured film base for printing. The toning process involved chemically treating film emulsion to colour the dark areas of the print. Each process produced monochrome images, the colour of which was usually chosen to correspond to the mood or setting of the scene. Occasionally, the two processes were combined to produce elaborate two-colour effects. By the early 1920s, nearly all American features included at least one coloured sequence; but after 1927, when it was discovered that tinting or toning film stock interfered with the transmission of optical sound, both practices were temporarily abandoned, leaving the market open to new systems of colour photography.

Photographic colour can be produced in motion pictures by using either an additive process or a subtractive one. The first systems to be developed and used were all additive ones, such as Charles Urban’s Kinemacolor (c. 1906) and Gaumont’s Chronochrome (c. 1912). They achieved varying degrees of popularity, but none was entirely successful, largely because all additive systems involve the use of both special cameras and projectors, which ultimately makes them too complicated and costly for widespread industrial use.

One of the first successful subtractive processes was a two-colour one introduced by Herbert Kalmus’s Technicolor Corporation in 1922. It used a special camera and a complex procedure to produce two separate positive prints that were then cemented together into a single print. The final print needed careful handling but could be projected using by means of ordinary equipment. This “cemented positive” process was used successfully in such features as Toll of the Sea (1922) and Fairbanks’s The Black Pirate (1926). In 1928 Technicolor introduced an improved process in which two gelatin positives were used as relief matrices to “print” colour onto a single strip of film. This printing process, known as imbibition, or dye-transfer, made it possible to mass-produce sturdy, high-quality prints. Its introduction resulted in a significant rise in Technicolor production between 1929 and 1932. Colour reproduction in the two-colour Technicolor process was good, but, because only two of the three primary colours were used, it was still not completely lifelike. Its popularity began to decline sharply in 1932, and Technicolor replaced it with a three-colour system that employed the same basic principles but included all three primary colours.

For the next 25 years almost every colour film made was produced by using Technicolor’s three-colour system. Although the quality of the system was excellent, there were drawbacks. The bulk of the camera made location shooting difficult. Furthermore, Technicolor’s virtual monopoly gave it indirect control of the production companies, which were required to rent—at high rates—equipment, crew, consultants, and laboratory services from Technicolor every time they used the system. In the midst of the Depression, therefore, conversion to colour was slow and never really complete. After three-colour Technicolor was used successfully in Disney’s cartoon short The Three Little Pigs (1933), the live-action short La Cucaracha (1934), and Rouben Mamoulian’s live-action feature Becky Sharp (1935), it gradually worked its way into mainstream feature production (The Garden of Allah, 1936; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937; The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938; The Wizard of Oz, 1939; Gone with the Wind, 1939), although it remained strongly associated with fantasy and spectacle.

The Hollywood studio system

If the coming of sound changed the aesthetic dynamics of the filmmaking process, it altered the economic structure of the industry even more, precipitating some of the largest mergers in motion-picture history. Throughout the 1920s, Paramount, MGM, First National, and other studios had conducted ambitious campaigns of vertical integration by ruthlessly acquiring first-run theatre chains. It was primarily in response to these those aggressive maneuvers that Warner Brothers and Fox sought to dominate smaller exhibitors by providing prerecorded musical accompaniment to their films. The unexpected success of their strategy forced the industry-wide industrywide conversion to sound and transformed Warner Brothers and Fox into major corporations. By 1929, Warner Brothers had acquired the Stanley theatre circuit, which controlled nearly all the first-run houses in the mid-Atlantic states, and the production and distribution facilities of its former rival First National to become one of the largest studios in Hollywood. Fox went even furtherfarther, building the multimillion-dollar Movietone City in Westwood, CaliforniaCalif., in 1928 and acquiring controlling shares of both Loew’s, Inc., the parent corporation of MGM, and Gaumont British, England’s largest producer-distributor-exhibitor. Its holdings were surpassed only by those of Paramount, which controlled an international distribution network and the vast Publix theatre chain. In an effort to become even more powerful, Paramount in 1929 acquired one-half of the newly formed Columbia Broadcasting System and proposed a merger with Warner Brothers. It was then that the U.S. Department of Justice intervened, forbidding Paramount’s merger with Warner Brothers and divorcing Fox from Loew’s.

Without government interference, “Paramount-Vitaphone” and “Fox-Loew’s” might have divided the entertainment industries of the entire English-speaking world between them. As it was, by 1930, 95 percent of all American production was concentrated in the hands of only eight studios—five vertically integrated major companies, which controlled production, distribution, and exhibition, and three horizontally integrated minor ones that controlled production and distribution. Distribution was conducted at both a national and an international level: since about 1925, foreign rentals had accounted for half of all American feature revenues, and they would continue to do so for the next two decades. Exhibition was controlled through the major studios’ ownership of 2,600 first-run theatres, which represented 16 percent of the national total but generated three-fourths of the revenue. Film production throughout the 1930s and ’40s consumed only 5 percent of total corporate assets, while distribution accounted for another 1 percent. The remaining 94 percent of the studios’ investment went to the exhibition sector. In short, as film historian Douglas Gomery pointed out, the five major studios of the time can best be characterized as “diversified theater chains, producing features, shorts, cartoons, and newsreels to fill their houses.”

Each studio produced a distinctive style of entertainment, depending on its corporate economy and the personnel it had under contract. MGM, the largest and most powerful of the major studios, was also the most “American” and was given to the celebration of middle-class values in a visual style characterized by bright, even, high-key lighting and opulent production design. Paramount, with its legions of UFA-trained directors, art directors, and cameramen, was thought to be the most “European” of the studios. It produced the most sophisticated and visually baroque films of the era. Conditioned by its recent experience as a struggling minor studio, Warner Brothers was the most cost-conscious of the major companies. Its directors worked on a quota system, and a flat, low-key lighting style was decreed by the studio to conceal the cheapness of its sets. Warner Brothers’ films were often targeted for working-class audiences. Twentieth Century–Fox was formed in 1935 by the merger of Fox Film Corporation and Joseph M. Schenck’s Twentieth Century Pictures after William Fox was bankrupted through his financial manipulations. The studio acquired a reputation for its tight budget and production control, but its films were noted for their glossy attractiveness and state-of-the-art special effects. RKO Radio was the smallest of the major companies and never achieved complete financial stability during the studio era; it became prominent, however, as the producer of King Kong (1933), the Astaire-Rogers dance cycle, and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and also as the distributor of Disney’s features.

The minor studios were Carl Laemmle’s Universal Pictures, which became justly famous for its horror films; Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures, whose main assets were director Frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin; and United Artists, which functioned as a distributor for independent American features and for Alexander Korda’s London Film Productions. In terms of total assets, the five major studios were about four times as big as the three minor ones, with MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, and Twentieth Century–Fox all about the same size and RKO approximately 25 percent smaller than its peers. At the very bottom of the film industry hierarchy were a score of poorly capitalized studios, such as Republic, Monogram, and Grand National, that produced cheap , formulaic , hour-long “B movies” for the second half of double bills. The double feature, an attraction introduced in the early 1930s to counter the Depression-era box-office slump, was the standard form of exhibition for about 15 years. The larger studios were, for the most part, not interested in producing B movies for double bills, because, unlike the main feature, whose earnings were based on box-office receipts, the second feature rented at a flat rate, which meant that the profit it returned, though guaranteed, was fixed at a small amount. At their peak, the B-film studios produced 40–50 movies per year and provided a training ground for such stars as John Wayne. The films were made as quickly as possible, and directors functioned as their own producers, with complete authority over their projects’ minuscule budgets.

An important aspect of the studio system was the Production Code, which was implemented in 1934 in response to pressure from the Legion of Decency and public protest against the graphic violence and sexual suggestiveness of some sound films (the urban gangster films, for example, and the films of Mae West). The Legion had been established in 1933 by the American bishops of the Roman Catholic church (armed with a mandate from the Vatican) to fight for better and more “moral” motion pictures. In April 1934, with the support of both Protestant and Jewish organizations, the Legion called for a nationwide boycott of movies it considered indecent. The studios, having lost millions of dollars in 1933 as the delayed effects of the Depression caught up with the box office, rushed to appease the protesters by authorizing the MPPDA to create the Production Code Administration. A prominent Catholic layman, Joseph I. Breen, was appointed to head the administration, and under Breen’s auspices Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest, and Martin Quigley, a Catholic publisher, coauthored the code whose provisions would dictate the content of American motion pictures, without exception, for the next 20 years.

In a swing away from the excesses of the “new morality” of the Jazz Age, the Production Code was monumentally repressive, forbidding the depiction on-screen of almost everything germane to the experience of normal human adults. It prohibited showing “scenes of passion,” and adultery, illicit sex, seduction, and rape could not even be alluded to unless they were absolutely essential to the plot and severely punished by the film’s end. The code demanded that the sanctity of marriage be upheld at all times, although sexual relations were not to be suggested between spouses. It forbade the use of profanity, vulgarity, and racial epithets; prostitution, miscegenation, sexual deviance, or drug addiction; nudity, sexually suggestive dancing or costumes, and “lustful kissing”; and excessive drinking, cruelty to animals or children, and the representation of surgical operations, especially childbirth, “in fact or silhouette.” In the realm of violence, it was forbidden to display or to discuss contemporary weapons, to show the details of a crime, to show law-enforcement officers dying at the hands of criminals, to suggest excessive brutality or slaughter, or to use murder or suicide except when crucial to the plot. Finally, the code required that all criminal activity be shown to be punished; under no circumstances could any crime be represented as justified. Studios were required to submit their scripts to Breen’s office for approval before beginning filming, and completed films had to be screened for the office, and altered if necessary, in order to receive a Production Code Seal, without which no film could be distributed in the United States. Noncompliance with the code’s restrictions brought a fine of $25,000, but the studios were so anxious eager to please that the fine was never levied in the 22-year lifetime of the code.

The studio heads were willing not merely to accept but also to institutionalize this system of de facto censorship and prior restraint because they believed it was necessary for the continued success of their business. The economic threat of a national boycott during the worst years of the Depression was real, and the film industry, which depends on pleasing a mass audience, could not afford to ignore public opinion. Producers found, moreover, that they could use the code to increase the efficiency of production. By rigidly prescribing and proscribing the kinds of behaviour that could be shown or described on the screen, the code could be used as a scriptwriter’s blueprint. A love story, for example, could only move in only one direction (toward marriage), ; adultery and crime could have only one conclusion (disease or horrible death), ; dialogue in all situations had well-defined parameters, ; and so forth. The code, in other words, provided a framework for the construction of screenplays and enabled studios to streamline what had always been (and still is) one of the most difficult and yet most essential tasks in the production process—the creation of filmable continuity scripts. Furthermore, the Depression was a time of open political anti-Semitism in the United States, and the men who controlled the American motion-picture industry were all mainly Jewish; it was not a propitious moment for them to antagonize their predominantly non-Jewish audience.

Between 1930 and 1945, the studio system produced more than 7,500 features, every stage of which, from conception through exhibition, was carefully controlled. Among these assembly-line productions are some of the most important American films ever made, the work of gifted directors who managed to transcend the mechanistic nature of the system to produce work of unique personal vision. These directors include Josef von Sternberg, whose exotically stylized films starring Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express, 1932; The Scarlet Empress, 1934) constitute a kind of painting with light; John Ford, whose vision of history as moral truth produced such mythic works as Stagecoach (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), My Darling Clementine (1946), and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); Howard Hawks, a master of genres and the architect of a tough, functional “American” style of narrative exemplified in his films Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and The Big Sleep (1946); British émigré Alfred Hitchcock, whose films appealed to the popular audience as suspense melodramas but were in fact abstract visual psychodramas of guilt and spiritual terror (Rebecca, 1940; Suspicion, 1941; Shadow of a Doubt, 1943; Notorious, 1946); and Frank Capra, whose cheerful screwball comedies (It Happened One Night, 1934) and populist fantasies of good will (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) sometimes gave way to darker warnings against losing faith and integrity (It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946). Other significant directors with less-consistent thematic or visual styles were William Wyler (Wuthering Heights, 1939; The Little Foxes, 1941), George Cukor (Camille, 1936; The Philadelphia Story, 1940), Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, 1937; Going My Way, 1944), Preston Sturges (Sullivan’s Travels, 1941; The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, 1944), and George Stevens (Gunga Din, 1939; Woman of the Year, 1942).

The most extraordinary film to emerge from the studio system, however, was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), whose controversial theme and experimental technique combined to make it a classic. The first of six films Welles had contracted to produce for RKO with his Mercury Theater radio ensemble company, Citizen Kane made radically innovative use of sound and deep-focus photography as it examined the life of Charles Foster Kane, a character based on the press baron William Randolph Hearst. The film employs a complicated flashback structure in which Kane’s friends and associates give their accounts of the man after his death, paradoxically revealing not greatness or might but pathetic insecurity and emptiness. In creating this portrait of a powerful American who could bend international politics to his will but never fathom human love, Welles stretched the technology of image and sound recording beyond its contemporary limits. Using a newly available Eastman film stock with increased sensitivity to light, plastic-coated wide-angle lenses opened to smaller-than-normal apertures, and high-intensity arc lamps, cinematographer Gregg Toland achieved a photographic depth of field that approximated the perceptual range of the human eye and enabled Welles to place the film’s characters in several different planes of depth within a single scene. These deep-focus sequence shots are complemented throughout the film by the techniques of ambient and directional sound that Welles had learned from radio. Most important of all, the resonance of the film’s narrative matches the technical brilliance of its presentation, functioning on several levels at once, : the historical, the psychological, and the mythic. Although recognized by many critics as a work of genius, Citizen Kane was a financial failure on its release, and Welles directed only three other films under his RKO contract. Citizen Kane remains, nevertheless, one of the most influential films ever made and is widely considered to be one of the greatest.

International cinema


Great Britain







Germany and Italy


German cinema became moribund after After Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, primarily because Joseph Goebbels encouraged filmmakers to produce trivial and escapist entertainment rather than more meaningful or thought-provoking fare. One director who did create films of undeniable artistic quality under Goebbels’s regime was Leni Riefenstahl. She made striking use of asynchronous sound and montage in two propaganda epics commissioned by Hitler, the German film industry came under the complete control of the Nazi Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Its head, Joseph Goebbels, believed ideological indoctrination worked best when conveyed through entertainment, so Nazi cinema put forth its political propaganda in the form of genre films such as comedies, musicals, and melodramas. The most famous and controversial films produced in Nazi Germany were documentaries by Leni Riefenstahl, whom Hitler recruited to record a Nazi party rally for Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935) and Olympische Spiele 1936 the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin for Olympia (1938). A

The situation was similar situation existed in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, where fascist censorship mandated the production of telefono bianco, or “white telephone,” films (lightweight romantic comedies with glamorous studio sets) and occasional nationalist propaganda, although Mussolini did establish popular genre films as well as historical epics carried the messages of the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. Italy also sought to strengthen its film culture during this era by establishing a national film school (, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia , 1935) (founded 1935; “Experimental Centre of Cinematography”), and a huge major new studio complex (Cinecittà, in Rome, Cinecittà (opened 1937) in Rome. Both of these institutions continued in operation after World War II and played a significant role in subsequent film history.

Soviet Union





