The Oxford History of World Cinema (13 page)

unlicensed exchanges and nickelodeons. In late 1909, Carl Laemmle, who had entered the

business as a distributor, founded the Independent Moving Picture Company, known as

IMP, to produce films for his customers, since he could not purchase films from the

MPPC. By the end of the year IMP released two reels a week of its own as well as two

Italian reels from the Itala and Ambrosio companies, an output that rivalled the most

powerful of the Trust companies. Not only did Laemmle spearhead the opposition, but

IMP eventually expanded to become Universal, one of the major studios of the

Hollywood silent period. By this time several other independent producers had gone into

business, some of the more significant being the Centaur Film Manufacturing Company,

the Nestor Company, and New York Motion Picture Company, which first employed

Thomas Ince. In 1910 Edwin Thanhouser founded the Thanhouser Company, using the

stock company from his theatre and specializing in literary and theatrical adaptations.

Also in 1910, the same year the MPPC established the General Film Company, the

independents formed their own combination to resist the Trust. Their distribution arm, the

Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Company, mimicked the Trust's practices,

regulating release dates and the price per foot, and also instituting standing orders from

exchanges to the studios and from the exhibitors to the exchanges.

With this move, the independents ceased to be independent in anything but name, and by

1911 two rival oligopolies controlled the United States film industry. It is wrong to

assume, as have some historians, that the Trust met its demise because of its conservative

business practices and resistance to new ideas such as the feature film and the star system.

It was an MPPC company, Vitagraph, which made many of the first American multireel

films. Similarly, while Carl Laemmle of IMP has been credited with forcing other

producers to emulate the theatrical star system through his promotion of Florence

Lawrence in 1910, MPPC companies had previously publicized their use of theatrical

stars and showed no reluctance to tout their own home-grown products.

Before 1908, several factors had militated against the development of a cinematic star

system. Initially, most moving picture actors were transient, working on the stage as well,

and did not remain with any particular company long enough to warrant promotion as a

star. This situation changed in 1908 as studios began to establish regular stock companies.

Also, until around 1909, film action was usually staged too far away from the camera for

audiences to recognize actors' features, a precondition for fan loyalty. At the outset of the

nickelodeon period audience loyalty was to the studio trademark rather than the actors,

and so most companies, both Trust and independent, resisted a star system until about

1910, fearing it would shift the economic balance of power (as indeed it did to some

extent). For this reason, the Biograph Company, which had some of the most popular

actors under contract, would not reveal its players' names until 1913. Other members of

the MPPC, however, did experiment, as early as 1909, with publicizing their use of

theatrical stars; the Edison Company advertising Miss Cecil Spooner in its adaptation of

Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, and Vitagraph inserting a title into its Oliver Twist

stating that Miss Elita Proctor appeared as 'Nancy Sikes'. By the next year, the mechanics

of star publicity were set in motion, as Kalem made lobby cards of its stock company for

display in nickelodeons. Other companies followed suit, distributing photographs to fans

as well as exhibitors and sending their stars out on personal appearances. The biggest

American stars of this period were Florence Lawrence of IMP (formerly of Biograph),

Florence Turner and Maurice Costello of Vitagraph, and, of course, Mary Pickford of

Biograph. Other countries also gave prominence to leading actors and, more commonly,

actresses in this period. The Danish actress Asta Nielsen was a leading light of both the

German and Danish cinema, while in Italy divas such as Francesca Bertini and Lyda

Borelli starred in films which they also produced.

Like the American industry, the French industry came into its own in 1907-8. Film was no

longer considered a poor cousin of photography but rather a major entertainment which

threatened the popularity of more traditional forms, such as the theatre. The increased

importance of the medium was shown by the remarkable increase in the number of

Parisian cinemas, from only ten in 1906 to eighty-seven by the end of 1908, as well as the

appearance in that year of the first regular newspaper column devoted to the moving

pictures. Pathé remained the most important of the studios, its only serious domestic

competition coming from the Gaumont Company, founded by Léon Gaumont in 1895.

Although less significant than Pathé in terms of output and international presence, from

1905 to 1915 Gaumont had the largest studio in the world. The company also had the

distinction of employing the first woman director, Alice Guy Blache, who later founded

the Solax Company with her husband Herbert Blache. Gaumont's most important director

was Louis Feuillade, who specialized in the detective serial, the most popular of which

was Fantômas, produced between 1913 and 1914, and based on a series of popular novels

about a master criminal and his detective nemesis. The box-office success of Feuillade's

serials enabled Gaumont to overtake Pathé as the country's most powerful studio, but it

achieved this position on the eve of the World War which caused the end of French

domination of international markets.

The Italian film industry had a relatively late start, dominated as it was by Lumières in the

early years. The Cines Company, founded by the Italian aristocrats Marchese Ernesto

Pacelli and Barone Alberto Fassini, built the country's first studio in 1905 and became one

of the most important producers of the silent period. Cines set the pace for the industry as

a whole by producing the first Italian costume film, La presa di Roma (
The Capture of

Rome,
1905), starring the famous theatrical actor Carlo Rosaspina. During its initial years,

Cines concentrated mostly on comedies, contemporary melodramas, and actualities, in

1906 producing sixty fiction films and thirty actualities. 1907 saw the real take-off of the

Italian industry, with both production and exhibition flourishing. Cines had built its studio

in Rome, another important company, Ambrosio, operated from Turin, and several other

producers built studios in Milan. In this year there were 500 cinemas in the country with

total box-office receipts of 18 million lire.

By 1908, then, the Italian industry was able to compete on the international market with

France and the United States, the Italian studios strengthening their position through the

production of historical spectaculars. Ambrosio's first version of Gli ultimi giorni di

Pompei (
The Last Days of Pompeii
) began a rage for the costume drama, many of which

dealt with Roman history or adapted Italian literary masterpieces: Giulio Cesare ( 1909),

Bruto ( 1909), and Il Conte Ugolino ( 1908, from Dante's Inferno). The relatively low

costs of building the massive sets and hiring the large casts of extras necessary for these

spectacle-intensive films enabled the Italians to differentiate their product from that of

their foreign rivals and break into the international market without massive expenditure.

This strategy succeeded so well that Pathé, concerned about Italian rivalry, established a

subsidiary, Film d'Arte Italiano, to produce costume films of its own. It took advantage of

location shooting amidst the splendours of Italian Renaissance architecture to produce

films like the 1909 Othello.

FILM PRODUCTION

In all the major producing countries, film production during this period was marked by an

increasing specialization and division of labour that brought the film industry into line

with other capitalist enterprises. In the early period film-making was a collaborative

enterprise, but the emergence of the director coincided with the appearance of other

specialists, such as script-writers, property men, and wardrobe mistresses, who worked

under his direction. Soon, the bigger American studios employed several directors, giving

each his own cast and crew and requiring him to turn out one reel a week. This led to the

creation of yet another job category, the producer, who oversaw the whole process, co-

ordinating between the individual units. In 1906 Vitagraph, the largest of the American

studios, had three separate production units headed by the company's founders, James

Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith, and their employee James Bernard French. These

men operated the cameras and had an assistant responsible for the staging of the action.

Vitagraph reorganized its production practices in 1907, putting a director in charge of

each unit and making Blackton the central producer. At Biograph, D. W. Griffith was the

sole director from June 1908 until December 1909. By the time Griffith left in autumn

1913, six directors were shooting Biograph films under his supervision, while he also

continued to direct his own unit.

With the exception of certain films designed to lend the new medium cultural

respectability, the American film industry during this period emphasized speed and

quantity. The studio front offices for the most part disdained 'artistry', since all films,

whether 'artistic' or not, sold for the same standard price per foot. In 1908 the average film

was shot in a single day at a cost of $200$500, and averaged one reel, or 1,000 feet, in

length. The introduction of artificial lighting in the form of mercury vapour lights in 1903

facilitated interior shooting but the studios still tended to film outdoors as much as

possible. Interiors were filmed in what were initially fairly small studios (the Biograph

studios were simply a converted New York City brownstone house) on theatrical sets with

painted backdrops.

Looking in more detail at the best documented of all the American studios, the Biograph

Company, permits us to follow the production of individual films through each step of the

process. In 1908 the Biograph Company hired one of their actors, David W. Griffith, as a

director, intending that he should simply rehearse the actors. But, as Griffith's cameraman

Billy Bitzer reported in his memoirs, the new director soon became responsible for much

more.

Before his [Griffith's] arrival, I, as cameraman, was responsible for everything except the

immediate hiring and handling of the actor. Soon it was his say whether the lights were

bright enough or if the make-up was right. . . . A cameraman had enough to do watching

the rapidity of the action and keeping the hand-cranked camera going at a steady pace to

prevent the film from buckling.

Until Griffith's institution as director, the Biograph Company had depended upon

transient actors, but the new director developed his own stock company, integral to the

period's ensemble style of film-making and, incidentally, presaging the Hollywood

studios' practice of keeping actors under exclusive contract. While Griffith had the

primary responsibility for hiring and casting, by the time he arrived at the studio Biograph

had a story department that had been producing scripts, perhaps since 1902. By the

nickelodeon period, it was standard practice for staff writers to prepare a script, often

without consulting the director, although in the case of Biograph Griffith seems to have

worked closely with the story department.

In most studios, although Biograph again may have been an exception, the principal

actors received scripts before the shooting occurred in order to prepare themselves for

rehearsals, which became increasingly important as stories grew more intricate. Rehearsal

time seems to have varied from one studio to another, although by 1911 a trade press

writer indicated that on average each scene was rehearsed from five to ten times. When

Griffith arrived at Biograph, the front office emphasized the rapid production of films,

and discouraged lengthy rehearsals, the directors simply ensuring that the actors remained

within camera range. By mid-1909, however, Griffith was already willing to devote half a

day or more to rehearsal, and by 1912 he averaged a week's rehearsal for each onereeler.

At Biograph, little remained to be done by the time of the actual shooting. The

cameraman's assistant put down the 'lines', using nails and cord to surround the area that

would be in the frame, and there would be a quick, final rehearsal for positioning. When

the camera began to crank, the actors were expected to do exactly what had been agreed

upon in rehearsals. Griffith did, however, coach from the sidelines, telling actors to tone it

down or give more. The tight schedule, with films taking only from one to three days to

shoot, prohibited retakes, requiring actors and technicians to get everything right first

time. In the days before sound and elaborate special effects, the post-production process