IV.

Silent Movies

With a few experimental exceptions, motion pictures from their earliest days until the late 1920s lacked synchronous sound (sound that matches the action). But silent movies were rarely silent. Early films almost always were projected with piano or organ accompaniment, and sometimes also with a narrator or live actors behind the screen. As feature-length films (four reels, with a running time of 40 to 50 minutes or more) became the norm in the 1910s, live orchestras began to play in larger theaters, frequently using music written specifically for the film.

Until World War I (1914-1918) European filmmakers dominated the world film market. France was considered the leading film-producing country, though Italy, Denmark, and other countries also played a significant role. However, the war, fought on European soil, disrupted commercial filmmaking there. With a sudden drop in European film exports, some regions, such as Latin America, experienced a brief surge in film production. But U.S. companies soon took over markets overseas, using the same tactics of high-volume production and lower prices that the Europeans had. By the 1920s some three-quarters of films screened around the world came from the United States.

A.

American Silent Movies

Even before the war, the United States had made its mark on the world filmmaking scene with epics and comedies. Moreover, U.S. moviemakers had begun to congregate in southern California in the Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood (see The Move to Hollywood, below), creating a film community apart from older urban centers of politics and the arts, and a magical new symbol for popular entertainment and glamour.

A.1.

D. W. Griffith

The work of D. W. Griffith exemplifies the transformation of motion pictures from the early days of one-reelers to an era of Hollywood’s worldwide dominance. Starting out as an actor in films directed by Edwin S. Porter, Griffith in 1908 became a director at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in New York City. He was initially responsible for turning out two one-reel films a week, and between 1908 and 1913 he directed nearly 500 films. Amidst this breakneck schedule, he and his coworkers developed many of the cinema’s basic storytelling conventions: moving the camera close to the action, using many separate shots, and editing the shots to cut back and forth among different actions. All these techniques served to shape a narrative, rather than present a spectacle as earlier films had tended to do. Griffith also nurtured performers such as Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish and emphasized an intimate, restrained style of acting suitable for camera close-ups.

Leaving Biograph in 1913 to make full-length features, Griffith planned a historical epic of the American Civil War (1861-1865). The Birth of a Nation (1915), three hours in length, stunned audiences with its dazzling spectacle of a still-recent event and established motion pictures as an art form for cultured spectators. Yet the film’s racist presumptions—specifically, its defense of white supremacy to protect racial purity—was controversial in its own time and remains repugnant decades later. Griffith made another epic, Intolerance (1916), which intertwined four stories about victims of prejudice, and continued to work as an independent filmmaker into the 1920s. Eventually, financial pressures forced him to become a director at a Hollywood studio, and he made his last film in 1931.

A.2.

The Move to Hollywood

The towering sets for scenes of ancient Babylon that Griffith built for Intolerance in an open Hollywood field became early landmarks of the new southern California movie community. Around 1910 Griffith and other East Coast filmmakers began to spend winters in California, and soon a number of film companies worked there year-round. Besides congenial weather, the locale offered varied terrains for filming: beaches, nearby mountains and deserts, and plenty of inexpensive land for building studio lots. A skilled workforce was available, and at lower wages than in other parts of the country. With no established older arts, in contrast to New York City and European film centers such as Paris, France; Berlin, Germany; and Rome, Italy; Hollywood became a movie “colony,” with a lifestyle that emphasized leisure, sports, and the outdoors.

Hollywood’s development also marked the triumph of independent producers over the attempted monopoly by the Eastern-based MPPC. While the latter’s producers had tried to limit production and film length, the independents moved into feature-length filmmaking and built up a star system to publicize their works. Among the independents, Universal Pictures set up its own incorporated town in the San Fernando Valley, north of Hollywood, called Universal City. Paramount Pictures and the Fox Film Corporation also emerged as prominent independent companies in the World War I era. These firms developed the Hollywood studio system in which a small group controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of films. The studio system would eventually be challenged as another kind of movie monopoly.

A.3.

Silent Comedies

Despite the stylistic innovations by Griffith and others, which made narrative dramatic films more prevalent, comedy remained a staple of silent cinema. After the trick films and risqué comedies of the early years, a new comic style called slapstick emerged in one-reelers. This boisterous, physical comedy was named for the stick wielded by clowns in Punch-and-Judy puppet shows. Mack Sennett, who had worked as an actor and comedy director with Griffith, formed a new company, Keystone, in 1912 that played an important role in developing slapstick comedy. Keystone, home of the hapless Keystone Kops, employed a host of comic talents, the most notable of whom was English actor Charlie Chaplin.

At Keystone, Chaplin developed his signature tramp character. He soon went on to direct, produce, write, and star in his own independent productions. By the World War I era, such classic short comedies as Easy Street (1917) and The Immigrant (1917) had brought him international fame greater than that of any other movie performer. Chaplin’s poignant but indomitable tramp created universal comedy that was firmly rooted in common life. In the 1920s Chaplin began making feature-length comedies, including The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925).

Two other performers in feature comedies during the 1920s, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, created more contemporary comic personas, young men coping with the mysteries of modern life. Keaton’s stone-faced character mastered machinery and his environment, most memorably in The General (1927), in which he gains control of a runaway railway engine. Lloyd portrayed an ambitious youth whose efforts to rise in life take physical form in Safety Last (1923), when his character climbs the side of a tall building, hanging precariously from flagpoles and ledges.

B.

European Silent Movies

After World War I circumstances of filmmaking in Europe greatly changed. American films by then predominated in a number of European countries, as well as elsewhere in the world. The once-powerful Italian and Danish film industries declined, while filmmakers in Germany and the newly founded Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) came to prominence. France, though no longer dominant, remained a center for theorizing about cinema and producing innovative and experimental works.

B.1.

Germany

Throughout the 1920s Germany had the strongest film industry in Europe, even as American films made inroads there and Hollywood lured top talent. Although Germany produced commercial films strictly for entertainment, filmmaking in the country emphasized cinema as an art form, with particular attention paid to visual atmosphere, conveyed through cinematography (motion-picture photography), lighting, and set design. Because Germany was perceived as the aggressor in World War I, its films had to be particularly striking to overcome hostility in export markets. Expressionism, an artistic movement that used deliberate distortion to express emotion, influenced some notable postwar features, in particular director Robert Wiene’s Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919) with its contorted abstract sets and narrative of a sleepwalking murderer who is controlled by a mysterious doctor.

Germany’s leading filmmakers during the 1920s included Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and G. W. Pabst. Lang’s films emphasized extraordinary visions of the material world in mythology, contemporary life, and the future. His most famous silent film was Metropolis (1927), a stunning depiction of a futuristic city with railway bridges running between upper stories of skyscrapers, while workers toil at huge machines underground. Murnau made works of deep psychological complexity, including the classic vampire film Nosferatu (1922) and Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), which visualizes the thoughts of an aging doorman who is demoted to washroom attendant. Pabst, known as a realist filmmaker, directed American actress Louise Brooks as Lulu in the sexual tragedy Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1928).

B.2.

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

In Russia the overthrow of the monarchy in 1917 was followed later that year by the Bolshevik Revolution, which established a communist regime that eventually took the name Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the wake of these events, a young generation of filmmakers was eager to establish a new film art based on the revolution’s ideals. The state-controlled Soviet silent cinema became for a time a remarkable combination of politics and avant-garde aesthetics, until its experimental spirit was stifled by shifts in political ideology. Shaped by heated internal debates, the works of filmmakers such as Sergey Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov continue to pose challenging questions about the relationship of politics and art.

Eisenstein was an important theorist as well as filmmaker. His essays on montage (the French term for film editing) explored the way individual film shots can be juxtaposed and linked to create meaning and to elicit an emotional response from spectators. He put these theories into practice in such films as Stachka (Strike, 1924), Bronenosets Potemkin (Potemkin, 1925), and Oktyabr (October, 1928, also known as Ten Days That Shook the World). Perhaps the most famous montage assemblage in film history is the Odessa Steps sequence of Potemkin, with approximately 155 separate shots in 4 minutes and 20 seconds of screen time depicting a massacre of civilians by soldiers.

Vertov (the professional name of Denis A. Kaufman) was an advocate of documentaries over fictional narratives. He too emphasized montage and the importance of the film editor in organizing and shaping the raw material of film footage. He directed, edited, and produced a newsreel series, Kino-Pravda (Cine-Truth, 1922-1925), and made documentary features, including Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929).

B.3.

France

In terms of commercial filmmaking, France’s film industry—the world’s strongest before World War I—occupied a struggling, marginal role after the war. Yet no other country had so firm a commitment to the medium as an art form or so rich a culture of journals and clubs devoted to criticizing and viewing innovative film work. In this atmosphere film took on a unique significance in intellectual life and among the other arts.

French film theorists coined such terms as photogenie and cinegraphie to express their views that cinema must emphasize images and their flow, rather than conventions used in the theater to convey dramatic action. They put their ideas into action in mostly short films, of which perhaps the most noted in critical writings has been La souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet, 1923), by female filmmaker and theorist Germaine Dulac.

The artistic movement called surrealism, which incorporated bizarre images and saw itself as an assault on everyday reality, also brought new concepts to filmmaking. Entr’acte (1924), directed by René Clair, used early cinema’s techniques of trick photography in the service of avant-garde art. Visual artists created films by animating designs and objects—painter Fernand Léger made Le ballet mécanique (1924) and Marcel Duchamp made Anémic Cinema (Anemic Cinema, 1926). A filmmaker who brought experimental ambitions to commercial feature efforts was Abel Gance, whose Napoléon (1927) was a five-hour film showing images in different combinations on three side-by-side screens.

Filmmakers from other countries also made important works in France. Carl-Theodor Dreyer of Denmark directed La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928), considered a classic for its unprecedented attention to psychological realism. Spaniards Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí made a surrealist film, Un chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), which became famous for its unusual and disturbing imagery.

C.

The Mature Silent Film

By the mid-1920s the United States had the largest film industry and American films dominated the international market. Germany and Japan also had substantial industries, although Japanese films were produced primarily for domestic consumption. Many nations sought to foster film production as a matter of importance to national culture, sometimes by placing quotas on film imports. Meanwhile, film became an international medium, with filmmakers creating works outside their homeland, as did Dreyer and Buñuel, or emigrating to take up their careers elsewhere. Germany’s Murnau, for example, moved to Hollywood and made one of the era’s most critically acclaimed American films, Sunrise (1927).

The consequences for society of this proliferating new medium were much debated. Movie stars such as Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and Rudolph Valentino were seen by millions and their glamour and sophistication had unprecedented impact on popular styles and behavior. Through the movies stories of sophisticated living and scenes of large-scale criminal activity were brought to rural areas and small towns as never before. Censorship bodies tried to control the influence of films by editing them before exhibition, or by proposing rules and standards for producers to follow.

As Hollywood and film industries elsewhere produced hundreds of films each year, certain standardized forms took precedence over individual creative inspiration. Movies adopted categories, known as genres, from earlier arts and popular entertainment. These included comedy, the Western, mystery, horror, romance, melodrama, and the war story. Within these genres were many variations and combinations, for example, the comedy-drama. Their hallmark was familiarity: Makers and spectators alike understood a genre’s conventions of story, character, setting, and costume.

D.

The Silent Documentary

Films of current events, which had been prominent in the early days of cinema, receded in importance as narrative fiction became the dominant mode of commercial filmmaking in the 1910s and 1920s. They were gradually replaced by the newsreel, a compilation of short news and feature clips that became a standard part of movie theater programs. Nonfiction films, known as documentaries, were largely confined to educational use, or were made for propaganda purposes in wartime.

Meanwhile, filmmakers continued to explore the world, recording people and places unknown to most spectators. One such figure was American Robert Flaherty, a miner and prospector in northern Canada who shot footage of Inuit people to preserve images of a vanishing way of life, though he created controversy by sometimes staging “traditional customs” that were by then obsolete. Flaherty made a feature documentary, Nanook of the North (1922), that was released commercially and became the greatest popular and critical success of any nonfiction film since the days of actualities. A Hollywood studio sent him to the South Pacific islands of Samoa for his second feature documentary, Moana (1926). Americans Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, who later became famous as creators of the fictional King Kong, launched their careers with Chang (1927), a spectacular travel documentary set in Siam (now Thailand).

European experimental filmmakers also became interested in nonfiction film as a way of interpreting modern life. Their works have been called city symphonies, a name taken from a German documentary made by Walter Ruttmann, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927), which traces a day of urban activity. In the USSR Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera was another such city symphony, about Moscow. In France, Jean Vigo and Boris Kaufman (Vertov’s brother) made A propos de Nice (On the Subject of Nice, 1930).