Monday, December 19, 2011

The History of the Motion Picture

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From the Lumiere brothers to the Cohn brothers, and from Hollywood to Bollywood, from the Oscars to the Cannes Film Festival, the story of cinema is at the heart of the media revolution.

It was more than just a new technology. The first glimpse of a movie astonished people in the early 1890s in the US and Europe, when short clips in Nickelodeon parlors were all the rage. Within a decade, the "movie" industry quickly became the most popular art form of the 20th century -- and the most controversial.

Until the 1890s, theater had always been confined to actors on a stage. Parlor toys like flip books the Zoetrope (US), and the Daedalum (England) were the closet anyone could come to having recorded images that could be played over and over. There was some new media flexibility after Daguerre announced the process for photography in 1839, since lectures and dramatic readings could be illustrated by glass photos projected on a theater screen. But glass was far too bulky and fragile to serve in place of film.



One man who did try using glass plates to sequence images was Eadweard Muybridge, a San Francisco photographer. Muybridge was hired by California governor Leland Stanford in 1877 to settle a bet. Stanford had bet that there is a moment when a horse, at a full gallop, completely leaves the ground. Muybridge set up an experiment involving a series of cameras with shutters hooked to trip wires, and helped the governor win the bet.

This was the closest anyone could come to motion pictures at the time, but this soon changed as chemical manufacturers began making celluloid in sheets. George Eastman and other photographers realized that celluloid film could make a small personal cameras possible, and Eastman set up the Kodak company in 1889. Within a few years, inventors in the US and Europe were working on cameras that could quickly advance celluloid film through a shutter, opening and closing 16 times a second, to take a sequence of images. Two major developments were:

Thomas Edison patented the Kinetoscope system in the United States, and introduced it at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
At the same time, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, patented the cinématographe system in France.
It's not unusual for inventions to be simultaneous. Radio, television, computer chips and many other inventions emerged from dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of people competing to solve technical problems, as we will see in future chapters.

Era of Experimentation 1800s - 1915

Both Edison and the Lumière brothers originally shot film of less than one minute on small enclosed stages. The very first films shot at studio showed people doing rather ordinary things -- sneezing, dancing, talking. The Lumiere brothers were the first to take the camera outside a studio, shooting film of everyday life in Paris and, soon, around the world. Unlike Edison's "Black Maria" films, these were carefully composed, organized narratives, often shot outdoors as a travelog, to show people what life was like elsewhere.

Originally these short films were shown in parlors with individual "peep show" projectors, which would give a single person one minute's worth of film for a nickle (five US cents). "Nickelodeon" halls quickly spread in Europe and the US, much like video game parlors in the 1980s. But the great profit in movies was quickly seen as showing long feature films to theater audiences. By 1900, projectors had been introduced commercially, and films were being shown in theaters around the world.



In 1877 Eadweard Muybridge helped governor of California win a $25,000 bet that at some point when a horse was running, all four hooves would leave the ground. Muybridge used a multiple camera technique with glass negatives.

It was only 1884, when George Eastman invented celluloid film, that it was possible to take a series of pictures with motion. Early pictures were 16 fps, which is why they looked so rapid when later replayed on 24 fps projectors.

Here Eadweard Muybridge photos of 1887 are strung together in a video.






1891 -- Thomas Edison -- Uses celluloid film in a motion picture camera, applies for patents on the Kinetograph and the player, a Kinetoscope Exhibited at Chicago World¹s fair in 1893. Within a few years, Nicolodeons were appearing all over the country.

1895 -- Woodville Latham -- Virginia inventor developed 70 mm film camera and projector, but the project ended in financial disaster.



1895 -- Auguste and Louis Lumiere shoot first outdoor film, workers leaving factory. As opposed to Edison's "Black Maria" films, these were carefully composed, organized narratives, often shot outdoors.

In the following years, the Lumiere Brothers sent photographers all around the world to capture motion pictures. Nearly 1,000 films were made by 1901. .






1902 -- George Melies "Trip to the Moon" based on the Jules Verne book sets new standard for film narrative. (Or in the original French)

Notice that the film is set up as a stage. What does that suggest about McLuhan's Tetrad?




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The Silent Era

Movies that told a story began to appear in the early 1900s. Many of the early films dealt with familiar topics in a new way (just as many early web pages were content "shoveled" from the print media onto the web). For instance, some of the first long movies involved the life of Moses and Christ, or Jules Verne's book, made into a movie by George Melies called a "Trip to the Moon" These were not revolutionary or controversial topics; but more revolutionary ideas were beginning to occur to emerging filmmakers, such as, Edwin S. Porter who produced The Great Train Robbery in 1903.

Socially conservative people were deeply troubled by the introduction of movies. "The motion picture's curious amalgam of technology, commercial entertainment, art and spectacle set it off as something quite unfamiliar and threatening to the old cultural elite," said historian Daniel Czitrom in "Media and the American Mind." Among these conservatives was Thomas Edison, the man most closely associated with the development of film in America.

Edison controlled most of the patents for movies, and he attempted to control both the business and its cultural impacts. In 1908, Edison formed the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908, also known as the "Edison Trust" (monopoly). The MPPC included competitors like Biograph, Vitagraph, Melies, Pathe and others, but not independent film makers. The MPPC standardized a chaotic industry with copyright, licensing and patent pools, but as a monopoly, they were also able to keep independent film makers from exhibiting in their theaters or using their equipment. The MPCC formed a national censorship board to exclude anything that seemed immoral, and led the national crusade for "moral purification" of movies. Although movies had relatively mild content, even by the standards of the day, the very fact that young people were congregating in dark, crowded nickelodeons instead of churches or lecture halls was alarming to an older generation and advocates of refined culture.

The Edison Trust's attempt to control the business failed. The independents, especially the founders of Universal, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox studios, moved away from the East coast to California, where mild weather and distance from the Edison company allowed feature film expansion. Then too, the dominance of European films ended abruptly with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Finally, the US Justice Dept. joined the independent producers in a lawsuit in 1915, contending that the MPCC was now illegal under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. In the landmark of United States v. Motion Picture Patents Company, 1915, the Supreme Court put a final end to the monopoly.

That same year, 1915, the court eased social conservatives fears in a related case, Mutual Film v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, by ruling that films are not protected by the First Amendment. States were then free to set standards and film censorship boards of their own, and many did. This system of censorship was consolidated in the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, which said: "No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it." Under the code, criminals could never win, and partial nudity, steamy sex scenes, and homosexuality were strictly banned. The code survived numerous court challenges until the 1960s, then changed to a rating system (G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17) administered by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

As a product of its times, the code did not prohibit narratives encouraging racism or anti-semitism that came to be considered immoral in the later 20th century. The code also made it more difficult for independent filmakers to compete against the big studios, and contributed to the Hollywood domination of international cinema well into the 21st century.

The Great Train Robbery -- 1903



Edison and the cultural elite of America begin to worry about the impact of films that featured violence.

Edwin S. Porter's Great Train Robbery was one example of the freewheeling new American movie, and an early innovators in the crime and western genre.

See Tim Dirks review of the film.

Also see Edison Motion Picutres Library of Congress site.


Birth of a Nation -- 1915

D.W. Griffith's positive portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan and his grossly prejudiced portrait of blacks contributed to a wave of lynchings and vigilante violence in the South. President Woodrow Wilson approved, saying the film was "history written with lightning."


Charlie Chaplin



Audiences loved movies, and actors in theater and "vaudeville" (variety shows) began migrating to the film industry in the early years of the 20th century. One of the most famous -- and by 1916, the best paid -- was Charlie Chaplin, a British vaudeville actor considered a genius of the silent screen.

At first working for Mutual Films, and then later as an independent with his own United Artists studio, Chaplin's classics included The Gold Rush, 1926 (right) City Lights, 1931, and Modern Times, 1936. This clip is among his most famous comic routines. It's the Oceana Roll, from the Gold Rush.


Chaplin's Modern Times -- 1936



This masterpiece film is often considered the end of the silent era.





The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari -- Germany, 1920

The most influential of the German expressionist film movement, this is the story of the discovery of a murder plot in an insane asylum.



The Battleship Potemkin -- Russia, 1925

In the 1920s, film begins to blossom as a more serious art form, and no one took film art more seriously than Sergei Eisenstein, a film maker working for the new Communist government of Russia. Eisenstien used relatively new techniques to tell a story.

This is the Odessa Steps scene from Eisenstein'sdepiction of a 1905 naval mutiny.

Notice the use of extreme closeups and montage to achieve emotional effects and help the audience side against the Czarist army and for the people and the rebellious navy.






The Jazz Singer - 1927
The first ³talkie² starred blackfaced actor Al Jolson. Caution: Jolson's blackface act is definitely offensive by modern standards, although meant more to be clownish at the time.

Its interesting to compare the level of propaganda in this clip with the stills and script of The Eternal Jew.

The ugly sterotypes iof African Americans in US cinema and cartoons were a far cry from the virulent, hate-filled screeds being pushed by the Nazis in the 1930s.

Here is a trailer for a documentary about Al Jolson.








Propaganda Films of the WWII era

The World War II era was considered the "golden age" of propaganda films. While the 1915 US film "Birth of a Nation" and the 1925 film "Battleship Potemkin" were both considered to have strong elements of propaganda.

A propaganda film is defined as one intended to convince viewers of a particular viewpoint, often with deliberately misleading content. Perhaps the classic propaganda film is Lani Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, made to glorify the Nazi Party in 1935.

Triumph of the Will - Germany, 1935

This film about the 1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremburg, produced by Lani Riefenstahl, is a patriotic glorification of the Nazis, and considering their control of all German media at the time, more or less the only image German people had of the Nazi party. The film greatly helped in Hitler's consolidation of power in the years before World War II.

Riefenstahl later claimed that she had no choice in making the film because she cold be arrested, and that she had no knowledge of Nazi concentration camps.

She also maintained that artists are not responsible for the political problems their art causes. She spent several years in detention after the war but was never convicted of war crimes.





Counter- Propaganda: Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator - 1940

Charlie Chaplin fought Nazism in the US with his 1940 film The Great Dictator.

Chapllin was once asked whether he was himself a Jew. "I do not have that honor," was his reply.





Virulent Propaganda: The Eternal Jew - 1940

Nazi propaganda had for years stoked the fires of hatred against Jews, comparing them to vermin and insisting that segregation of Jews from society -- or worse -- was the answer to Germany's problems.

The often unwilling participation of the mass media in Germany to these crude and ghastly caricatures greatly contributed to Holocaust genocide.

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American Propaganda: Why we Fight - 1942

While American war propaganda had plenty of appeal to emotional appeal, this film by Frank Capra and the Disney Studios was designed to convince an isolationist nation that its interests were at stake in the war.

The film was originally designed to be shown only to troops, but President Franklin Roosevelt thought it was so important he ordered it released to the general public. It was the first attempt by the US government to persuade through film on a massive level.







The Golden Age of Cinema 1930s - 1950s

With sound and color film at their disposal, Hollywood studios were able to pursue new directions in creativity in the 1930s. Each studio had its stars and rising stars of the screen, and Americans flocked to the theaters to see them. It was glorious entertainment but often curbed by the Motion Picture Production Code or other pressures in the industry.

Meanwhile in Europe, filmmakers like Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock were pushing back the envelopes of the Hollywood style.



Hell's Angels - 1930

A1930 film about pilots in World War I, directed by aviation pioneer Howard Hughes, contained "racy" scenes that led to demands for more enforcement from the Motion Picture Production Code. Other films then in production, such as King Kong, had to be edited because of the controversy.



Gone with the Wind 1939

The Hollywood cliassic based on Margaret Mitchell's book, Gone With the Wind gives a false picture of the post-Civil War South that is still widely accepted today.


Rules of the Game - France, 1939

Jean Renoir, the son of French painter Pierre-August Renoir, made dozens of films in a long career, but "Rules of the Game," a satire about French society, was not well understood when it was released in 1939.

Today it is often found on lists of the top 100 international films.











The Thirty-Nine Steps - England, 1935

Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 movie The Thirty Nine Steps was one of his earliest commercial successes. In it, a young man becomes innocently involved in a Nazi spy ring, runs from the police to prove his innocense, meets a beautiful woman along the way and has a terrific adventure.

The film was the first to use a "MacGuffin" -- an object that helps move the story forward but which proves to have only marginal significance at the end. The falcon in the Maltese Falcon is also a classic cinema MacGuffin.


Newsreels

Feature movies were usually shown with cartoons and other short items, the most important of which were newsreels, usually five to ten minutes long at most.

Among the more significant were the Pathe newsreels (1910-1956), Hearst Metrotone News (1914-1967), Fox Movietone News (1928-1963) and Universal Newsreel (1929-1967).

The genre started would feature celebrities, newsmakers and events around the world. Here we see a 1931 British Movietone interview with Mahatma Ghandi and an unknown American journalist.


Western Genre
A stagecoach trip is complicated by an Indian uprising in this classic 1945 film, Stagecoach. Westerns of the 1930s - 50s emphasized values like honor, duty and heroic sacrifice, while western films after the 1960s tend to reflect pessimism and put the anti-hero at the center of the action. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, made in 1963, provides a good comparison to Stagecoach.


Animation
Animated cartoons were usually short items that preceded the main feature that were shown along with newsreels. They were popular with children, and enabled movie-going to be a family experience.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937, was Walt Disney's most ambitious project to date and the first full length feature animation. It is still only one of two animated films on the American Film Institute's top 100 list (the other being Walt Disney's Fantasia).

The release of many other full length animations from the Disney sudios encouraged animators areound the world, such as Japanese animators Osamu Tezuka and Hayao Miyazaki.




Citizen Kane - 1941

Considered the best film of all time, director Orson Wells used his celebrity status from the Mercury Theater War of the Worlds scare in 1938 to independently direct a major studio movie. Citizen Kane was seen as an attack on newspaper chain owner William Randolph Hearst, and it was suppressed and nearly destroyed.

Here Siskel and Ebert review the film.


The Maltese Falcon -- 1941



John Huston's classic detective film with Humphrey Bogart reflects the Film Noir genre popular from the 1940s.



1942 Casablanca

One of the great scences from Casablanca has embedding disabled.







It's a Wonderful Life - 1945

Classic film by Frank Capra about a guy who stayed on the home front was the best of the symbolic reconcilation films that followed the trauma of World War II.







The Red scare hits Hollywood

In 1947 the House Unamerican Activities Committeebegan investigating supposed Communist infiltration in Hollywood. Many innocent actors and writers were blackballed and forbidden from working.

A few minor shreds of evidence concerning attempts by actual Communists to influence Hollywood productions may have been uncovered, but the fear generated by the witch hunt causes far more damage than any real or imagined communist infiltration.

The Hollywood Ten protested before the committee, but many actors, writers and directors were blacklisted, including Charlie Chaplin, Zero Mostel, and Dalton Trumbo.





Streetcar named desire - 1951
The controversial film starring Marlin Brando, based on Tennessee Williams play of the same name, showed just how much the Motion Picture Code could impose changes on the medium. Without even the knowledge of the director, references to rape, homosexuality and suicide were altered. The film has been re-released with original cuts restored.



The Seven Samurai 1954

Japanese film director Akiro Kurisawa's masterpiece was widely imitated and copied directly into the plot of the1960 film, The Magnificent Seven. It also directly influenced the structure of "men on a mission" films like The Guns of Navarone and the Dirty Dozen.


Horror genre films

Cold war paranoia of the 1950s was evident in themes such as invading armies of evil aliens, (Invasion of the Body Snatchers); and communist fifth columnists, (The Manchurian Candidate). TV was keeping audiences home, so studios start to make movies more shocking and graphic.





Cinema in the 1960s

Movies from the 1960s forward both reflected and led a major shift in world culture, away from patriotism and heroics and towards tolerance, introspection and personal growth.

Heroes were more seen as merely mortal. The choices between values were typically depicted in gritty shades of gray instead of in black and white.

War movies, for example, explored personal tragedy and human values more than heroics or the glory of combat. For example, where the 1941 film Sergeant York depicted an unvarnished backwoods hero of World War I, movies like the Bridge over the River Kwai (1957), the Guns of Navarone (1961) or the Dirty Dozen (1967) explored more personal and nuanced themes.

Western genre movies emerged as morality plays that featured anti-heroes, for instance, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1963) or Little Big Man (1970).

The horror genre moved from simple mosters attacking from outside to the monsters lurking within apparently ordinary human beings, for instance Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).

And a large number of dramas reflected relatively new social themes, such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Easy Rider (1969).

In some ways this edgier new approach was designed to attract movie audiences and give them something that could not be seen on television. However the same cultural maturity and pessimism also began to be reflected in television programs.

Another factor in the new and more socially daring approach to film was the breakup of vertical integration (studio lot to movie theater ownership) following the 1948 anti-trust case, US v Paramount, which led to more openings for independent film makers and directors.



Bridge over the River Kwai - 1957

Made after a long spate of heroic post-WWII movies, Bridge over the River Kwai depicted the humiliation of British prisoners of war by Japanese, and showed both prisoners and captors as human, fallible and capable of kindness as well as cruelty.



Psycho 1960

Considered Alfred Hitchcock's most famous movie, Psycho was shot on a shoestring budget on a spare set. It was shocking and unprecedented in its use of violence and was widely copied in the horror genre.









The Man who shot Liberty Valance - 1963


John Houston's most famous movie depicts a journalist trying to learn the truth about a western legend. In the end, his editor says:

"When the truth and legend conflict, print the legend."



To Kill a Mockingbird - 1962

A moving story about racial injustice in the American South, based on the book.


Jules and Jim - 1962

Francois Truffaut and the New Wave cinema of France broke the Hollywood rules with a menage a trois.


Dr. Strangelove - 1962
Stanley Kubrik's dark comedy was based on nuclear fears and parodied Henry Kissinger.


Easy Rider - 1969

Tragedy strikes when two hip motorcyclists travel to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Themes of freedom and prejudice intertwine with rock music and montage, making this one of the most celebrated films of its day.

The fact that it now seems dated provides an interesting opening into the mentality of the then-emerging counter-culture.


Shaft (1971)

Director Gordon Parks, famed photographer from the Farm Services Administration era, made the film to show blacks as strong, independent and smart in a way that was entirely new in American cinema.




The modern blockbuster

The demise of the Hollywood studio system and the rise of independent film makers in the "New Hollywood."

With more independence and better cinema effects technology, cutting edge films with more "blockbuster" potential emerged. The best example is Star Wars, which started as a back-lot experiment with new modeling and special effects techniques to bring viewers in closer to the action. It grossed $4.3 billion in the 30 years since the first film was made in 1977.

Star Wars - 1977

The beginning of the blockbuster era for George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg, whose films also included Jaws and Indian Jones.



Titanic - 1997


Avatar - 2009