The Oxford History of World Cinema (4 page)

growth. Beginning as a novelty in a handful of big cities -- New York, Paris, London, and

Berlin -- the new medium quickly found its way across the world, attracting larger and

larger audiences wherever it was shown and displacing other forms of entertainment as it

did so. As audiences grew, so did the places where films were shown, culminating in the

great 'picture palaces' of the 1920s which rivalled theatres and opera-houses for opulence

and splendour. Meanwhile films themselves developed from being short 'attractions', only

a couple of minutes long, to the feature length that has dominated the world's screens up

to the present day.

Although French, German, American, and British pioneers have all been credited with the

'invention' of cinema, the British and the Germans played a relatively small role in its

world-wide exploitation. It was above all the French, followed by the Americans, who

were the most ardent exporters of the new invention, helping to implant the cinema in

China, Japan, and Latin America as well as in Russia. In terms of artistic development it

was again the French and the Americans who took the lead, though in the years preceding

the First World War Italy, Denmark, and Russia also played a part.

In the end it was the United States that was to prove decisive. The United States was --

and has remained -- the largest single market for films. By protecting their own market

and pursuing a vigorous export policy, the Americans achieved a dominant position on the

world market by the eve of the First World War. During the war, while Europe languished,

the American cinema continued to develop, pioneering new techniques as well as

consolidating industrial control.

Meanwhile, in the United States itself, the centre of film-making had gravitated

westwards, to Hollywood, and it was films from the new Hollywood studios that flooded

on to the world's film markets in the years after the First World War -- and have done so

ever since. Faced with the Hollywood onslaught, few industries proved competitive. The

Italian industry, which had pioneered the feature film with lavish spectaculars like Quo

vadis? ( 1913) and Cabiria ( 1914), almost collapsed. In Scandinavia, the Swedish cinema

had a brief period of glory, notably with the powerful sagas of Victor Sjöström and the

brilliant comedies of Mauritz Stiller, before following Denmark into relative obscurity.

Even the French cinema found itself in a precarious position. In Europe, only Germany

proved industrially resilient, while in the new Soviet Union and in Japan the development

of the cinema took place in conditions of commercial isolation.

Hollywood took the lead artistically as well as industrially. Indeed the two aspects were

inseparable. Hollywood films appealed because they had betterconstructed narratives,

their effects were more grandiose, and the star system added a new dimension to screen

acting. Where Hollywood did not lead from its own resources it bought up artists and

technical innovations from Europe to ensure its continued dominance over present or

future competition. Sjöström, Stiller, and the latter's young protégé Greta Garbo were

lured away from Sweden, Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau from Germany; Fox acquired

many patents, including that of what was to become CinemaScope.

The rest of the world survived partly by learning from Hollywood and partly because

audiences continued to exist for a product which corresponded to needs which Hollywood

could not supply. As well as a popular audience, there were also increasing audiences for

films which were artistically more adventurous or which engaged with issues in the outer

world. Links were formed with the artistic avant-garde and with political groupings,

particularly on the left. Aesthetic movements emerged, allied to tendencies in the other

arts. Sometimes these were derivative, but in the Soviet Union the cinema was in the

vanguard of artistic development -- a fact which was widely recognized in the west. By

the end of the silent period, the cinema had established itself not only as an industry but

as the 'seventh art'.

None of this would have happened without technology, and cinema is in fact unique as an

art form in being defined by its technological character. The first section of Part I of this

book, '
The Early Years
', therefore begins with the technical and material developments

that brought the cinema into being and helped rapidly to turn it into a major art form. In

these early years this art form was quite primitive, and uncertain of its future

development. It also took some time before the cinema acquired its character as a

predominantly narrative and fictional medium. We have therefore divided the history of

the first two decades of cinema into two: an early period proper (up to about 1905); and a

transitional period (up to the emergence of the feature film shortly before the First World

War), during which the cinema began to acquire that character as a form of narrative

spectacle which has principally defined it ever since.

The watershed came with the First World War, which definitively sealed American

hegemony, at least in the mainstream of development. The second section,'The Rise of

Hollywood', looks first at Hollywood itself in the 1910s and 1920s and the way the

Hollywood system operated as an integrated industry, controlling all aspects of cinema

from production to exhibition. The international ramifications of America's rise to

dominance are considered next. By 1914 the cinema was a truly world-wide business,

with films being made and shown throughout the industrialized world. But it was a

business in which the levers of power were operated from afar, first in Paris and London,

and then increasingly in New York and Hollywood, and it is impossible to understand the

development of world cinema without recognizing the effect that control of international

distribution had on nascent or established industries elsewhere.

As far as European cinema was concerned, the war provoked a crisis that was not merely

economic. Not only did European exporters such as France, Britain, and Italy lose control

over overseas markets, and find their own markets opened up to increasingly powerful

American competition, but the whole cultural climate changed in the aftermath of war.

The triumph of Hollywood in the 1920s was a triumph of the New World over the Old,

marking the emergence of the canons of modern American mass culture not only in

America but in countries as yet uncertain how to receive it.

Early cinema programmes were a hotch-potch of items, mingling actualities, comic

sketches, free-standing narratives, serial episodes, and the occasional trick or animated

film. With the coming of the feature-length narrative as centrepiece of the programme,

other types of film were relegated to a secondary position, or forced to find alternative

viewing contexts. This did not in fact hinder their development, but tended rather to

reinforce their distinct identities. The making of animated cartoons became a separate

branch of film-making, generally practised outside the major studios, and the same was

true of serials. Together with newsreels, both cartoons and serial episodes tended to be

shown as short items in a programme culminating in the feature, though some of Louis

Feuillade's serials in France could fill a whole programme and there were occasional

attempts at feature-length animation. Of the genres emerging out of the early cinema,

however, it was really only slapstick comedy that successfully developed in both short

and feature format. While Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton made a successful transition

to features in the early 1920s, the majority of silent comedians, including Stan Laurel and

Oliver Hardy, built their careers in the silent period almost entirely around the short film.

The section 'The Silent Film' looks at the kinds of film, like animation, comedy, and

serials, which continued to thrive alongside the dramatic feature in the 1920s, and also at

the factual film or documentary, which acquired an increasing distinctiveness as the

period progressed, and at the rise of avant-garde film-making parallel (and sometimes

counter) to the mainstream. Both documentary and the avant-garde achieved occasional

commercial successes ( Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North ran for several months in a

cinema in Paris; and works by French 'impressionist' film-makers like Jean Epstein and

Germaine Dulac also attracted substantial audiences). On the whole, however,

documentary and the avant-garde were non-commercial forms, with values distinct from

the mainstream and a cultural and political role that cannot be assessed in commercial

terms. The film avant-garde had an important place in the modernist art movements of the

1920s, especially in France (with Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray), but

also in Germany (Hans Richter) and the Soviet Union, and this modernist impulse was to

animate documentary both in the 1920s (Dziga Vertov in the Soviet Union, Walter

Ruttmann in Germany) and after.

Of the countries which developed and managed to sustain distinctive national cinemas in

the silent period the most important were France, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Of

these, the French cinema displayed the most continuity, in spite of the crisis provoked by

the war and the economic uncertainties of the post-war period. The German cinema, by

contrast, relatively insignificant in the pre-war years, exploded on to the world scene with

the 'expressionist' Cabinet of Dr Caligari in 1919 and throughout the Weimar period

succeeded in harnessing a wide spectrum of artistic energies into new cinematic forms.

Even more spectacular was the emergence of the Soviet cinema after the Revolution of

1917. The new Soviet cinema resolutely turned its back on the past, leaving the style of

the pre-war Russian cinema to be perpetuated by the many
émigrés
who fled westwards

to escape the Revolution. The section on National Cinemas gives separate treatment to all

three elements: the pre-revolutionary Russian cinema, recently rediscovered; the Soviet

cinema; and the Russian
émigrés.

The other countries whose cinemas merit an article of their own in this Part are: Britain,

which had an interesting but relatively undistinguished history in the silent period; Italy,

which had a brief moment of international fame just before the war; the Scandinavian

countries, mainly Denmark and Sweden, which played a role in the development of silent

cinema quite out of proportion to their small populations; and Japan, where a cinema

developed based on traditional theatrical and other art forms and only gradually adapted

to western influence. Space is also given to the unique phenomenon of the transnational

Yiddish cinema, which flourished in eastern and central Europe in the inter-war years.

For most of these articles the period covered is from the earliest days up to the

introduction of synchronized sound at the end of the 1920s. For the German cinema,

however, the cut-off point is the Nazi takeover in 1933. For similar reasons the story of

Yiddish cinema is carried up to 1939, when it was brutally terminated by the Holocaust.

In the case of Japan, only the years up to the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 are covered

in this part, and the later development of silent cinema in Japan, which went on well into

the 1930s, is dealt with in Part II.

Silent cinema is strictly speaking a misnomer, for although films themselves were silent,

the cinema was not. The showing of early films, particularly non-fiction, was often

accompanied by a lecturer or barker, and in Japan there developed the remarkable

institution of the benshi, who both commented on the action and spoke the dialogue. It

was largely because of the benshi that silent film survived in Japan long after other

countries had converted to sound. Universal throughout the 'silent' cinema, however, was

musical accompaniment, which ranged from improvisations on an out-of-tune piano to

full orchestral scores by composers of the calibre of Saint-Saëns ( L'Assassinat du Duc de

Guise, 1908) or Shostakovich ( New Babylon, 1929). Music was an integral part of the

silent film experience. The final section of this part looks first at the extraordinary

development of film music and its role in shaping the audience's perception, before

proceeding to an overview of what the silent cinema was like in its heyday in the 1920s.

THE EARLY YEARS

Origins and Survival

PAOLO CHERCHI USAI

PRE-CINEMA, FILM, TELEVISION

The history of cinema did not begin with a 'big bang'. No single event -- whether Edison's

patented invention of the Kinetoscope in 1891 or the Lumière brothers' first projection of

films to a paying audience in 1895 -- can be held to separate a nebulous pre-cinema from

cinema proper. Rather there is a continuum which begins with early experiments and

devices aimed at presenting images in sequence (from Étienne Gaspard Robertson's

Phantasmagoria of 1798 to Émile Reynaud's Pantomimes lumineuses of 1892) and

includes not only the emergence in the 1890s of an apparatus recognizable as cinema but