The Oxford History of World Cinema (7 page)

the camera. For its part, camera speed varied according to a number of factors: the

amount of available light during shooting, the sensitivity of the film stock, and the nature

of the action being recorded. To keep the movements of the characters on the screen

'natural', projectionists in the years before 1920 showed films at various speeds, most

often between 14 and 18 frames per second. (The flicker effect that these relatively slow

speeds tended to produce was eliminated by the introduction early in the century of a

three-bladed shutter which opened and closed three times during the showing of each

frame.) The average speed of projection increased as time went on, and by the end of the

period it had regularly reached a norm of 24 frames per second, which became the

standard for sound film. Faster and slower speeds were occasionally used for colour film

experiments or in some amateur equipment.

The quality of projection was greatly affected by the type of light source being used.

Before electric arc lights became standard, the usual method of producing light for the

projector was to heat a piece of lime or a similar substance until it glowed white hot. The

efficacy of this method (known as 'limelight') was very dependent on the nature and

quality of the fuel used to heat the lime. The usual fuels were a mixture of coal-gas and

oxygen or of ether and oxygen. Acetylene was also tried, but soon abandoned as it

produced a weak light and gave off a disagreeable smell.

FROM PRODUCTION TO EXHIBITION

It is not known (and probably never will be known) exactly how many films of all types

were produced during the silent period, but the figure is almost certainly in the order of

150,000, of which not more than 20,000 to 25,000 are known to have survived. With the

rapid growth of the film business, films soon came to be printed in large numbers. For

Den hvide slavehandel II ('The white slave trade II', August Blom, 1911) the Danish

company Nordisk made no fewer than 260 copies for world-wide distribution. On the

other hand many early American films listed in distributors' catalogues seem to have sold

not more than a couple of copies, and in some cases it may be that none at all were

printed, due to lack of demand.

Since the cinema was from the outset an international business, films had to be shipped

from one country to another, often in different versions. Films might be recorded on two

side-by-side cameras simultaneously, producing two different negatives. Intertitles would

be shot in different languages, and shipped with the prints or a duplicate negative of the

film to a foreign distributor. Sometimes only one frame of each title would be provided, to

be expanded to full length when copies were made, and some films have survived with

only these 'flash titles' or with no titles at all. Sometimes different endings were produced

to suit the tastes of the public in various parts of the world. In eastern Europe for example,

there was a taste for the 'Russian' or tragic ending in preference to the 'happy end'

expected by audiences in America. It was also common to issue coloured prints of a film

for show in luxury theatres and cheaper black and white ones for more modest locales.

Finally, censorship, both national and local, often imposed cuts or other changes in films

at the time of release, and many American films in particular have survived in different

forms as a result of the varied censorship practices of state or city censorship boards.

DECAY

In the early years of the cinema films were looked on as essentially ephemeral and little

attempt was made to preserve them once they reached the end of their commercial life.

The appeal of the Polish scholar Bolesław Matuszewski in 1898 for a permanent archive

of film images to be created to serve as a record for future generations fell on deaf ears,

and it was not until the 1930s that the first film archives were created in a number of

countries to preserve surviving films for posterity. By that time, however, many films had

been irretrievably lost and many others dispersed. The world's archives have now

collected together some 30,000 prints of silent films, but the lack of resources for

cataloguing them means that it is not known how many of these are duplicate prints of the

same version, or, in the case of what appear to be duplicates, whether there are significant

differences between versions of films with the same title. While the number of films

collected continues to rise, the number of surviving films is still probably less than 20 per

cent of those thought to have been made.

Meanwhile, even as the number of rediscovered films rises, a further problem is created

by the perishable nature of the nitrate base on which the vast majority of silent (and early

sound) films were printed. For not only is cellulose nitrate highly flammable, which may

in some cases lead to spontaneous combustion: it is also liable to decay and in the course

of decay it destroys the emulsion which bears the image. Even in the best conservation

conditions (that is to say at very low temperatures and the correct level of humidity), the

nitrate base begins to decompose from the moment it is produced. In the course of the

process the film emits various gases, and in particular nitrous anhydride, which, combined

with air and with the water in the gelatine, produces nitrous and nitric acids. These acids

corrode the silver salts of the emulsion, thereby destroying the image along with its

support, until eventually the whole film is dissolved.

RESTORATION

The decomposition of nitrate film can be slowed down, but not halted. For this reason

film archives are engaged in a struggle to prolong its life until such time as the image can

be transferred to a different support. Unfortunately the cellulose acetate base on to which

the transfer is made is itself liable to eventual decay unless kept under ideal atmospheric

conditions. Even so, it is far more stable than nitrate and infinitely preferable to magnetic

(video) tape, which is not only perishable but is unsuitable for reproducing the character

of the original film. It may be that some time in the future it will prove possible to

preserve film images digitally, but this has not yet been demonstrated to be a practical

possibility.

The aim of restoration is to reproduce the moving image in a form as close as possible to

that in which it was originally shown. But all copies that are made are necessarily

imperfect. For a start, they have had to be duplicated from one base on to another, with an

inevitable loss of some of the original quality. It is also extremely difficult to reproduce

colour techniques such as tinting and toning, even if the film is copied on to colour stock,

which, given the expense, is far from being universal practice. Many films which were

originally coloured are now only seen, if at all, in black and white form.

To appreciate a silent film in the form in which it was originally seen by audiences, it is

necessary to have the rare good luck of seeing an original nitrate print (increasingly

difficult because of modern fire regulations), and even then it has to be recognized that

each copy of a film has its own unique history and every showing will vary according to

which print is being shown and under what conditions. Different projection, different

music, the likely absence of an accompanying live show or light effects, mean that the

modern showing of silent films offers only a rough approximation of what silent film

screening was like for audiences at the time.

Bibliography

Abramson, Albert ( 1987),
The History of Television, 1880 to 1941
.

Cherchi Paolo Usai ( 1994),
Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent

Cinema
.

Hampton, Benjamin B. ( 1931),
A History of the Movies
.

Liesegang, Franz Paul ( 1986),
Moving and Projected Images: A Chronology of Pre-

cinema History
.

Magliozzi, Ronald S. (ed.) ( 1988),
Treasures from the Film Archives
.

Rathbun, John B. ( 1914),
Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting
.

The Loop and the Maltese Cross

The cinema did not really come into being until films could be projected. In this respect

the Kinetoscope, patented by Thomas Alva Edison and W. K. L. Dickson in 1891 and

marketed from 1893, cannot properly be considered cinema, since it consisted only of a

peepshow device through which short films could be viewed by one person at a time. In

the Kinetoscope the film ran continuously past a small shutter, as in Victorial optical toys

such as the Zoetrope, and the flow of light was constructed by the viewer's perceptual

apparatus to form an image of objects in motion - a form of viewing only possible if the

spectator was peering directly into the device. By 1895, however, a number of inventors

were ready with devices in which the film ran intermittently both in the camera and in a

projector, so that an image was held stably in front of the spectator before passing on to

the next one. In the Lumière borthers' Cinématographe, for example (in some versions of

which the same machine doubled as both camera and projector), a metal claw jerked the

film down frame by frame in front of the gate and the film was held steady for the

duration of each image. Since the Lumière films were very short, this form of intermittent

motion did not strain the film too severely.

For longer films, however, or for the regular projection of a sequence of short films, a

method had to be found to ease the passage of the film in front of the gate. By 1896-7,

thanks to the pioneering inventions of Woodville Latham in the United States and R. W.

Paul in Britain, projectors had been developed in which a loop of film was formed at the

gate between two continuouslyrunning sprocket wheels, and only the piece of film held in

the loop was given intermittent motion, thus protecting the film from undue strain. What

then attracted attention was how to find a smoother way of turning the continuous motion

of the camera projector motor into intermittent motion as the film passed the gate. The

solution, again pioneered by R. W. Paul, took the form of a device known as the Maltese

cross. A pin attached to a cam engaged with the little slots between the arms of the cross

as it rotated, and each time it did so the film was drawn forward one frame. The method,

perfected around 1905, remains in use for 35 mm. Projection to this day.

GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH

Early Cinema

ROBERT PEARSON

In the first two decades of its existence the cinema developed rapidly. What in 1895 had

been a mere novelty had by 1913 become an established industry. The earliest films were

little more than moving snapshots, barely one minute in length and often consisting of just

a single shot. By 1905, they were regularly five to ten minutes long and employed

changes of scene and camera position to tell a story or illustrate a theme. Then, in the

early 1910s, with the arrival of the first 'feature-length' films, there gradually emerged a

new set of conventions for handling complex narratives. By this time too, the making and

showing of films had itself become a large-scale business. No longer was the film show a

curiosity sandwiched into a variety of other spectacles, from singing or circus acts to

magic lantern shows. Instead specialist venues had been created, exclusively devoted to

the exhibition of films, and supplied by a number of large production and distribution

companies, based in major cities, who first sold and then increasingly rented films to

exhibitors all over the world. In the course of the 1910s the single most important centre

of supply ceased to be Paris, London, or New York, and became Los Angeles --

Hollywood.

The cinema of this period, from the mid- 1890s to the mid-1910s, is sometimes referred to

as 'pre-Hollywood' cinema, attesting to the growing hegemony of the California-based

American industry after the First World War. It has also been described as pre-classical, in

recognition of the role that a consolidated set of 'classical' narrative conventions was to

play in the world cinema from the 1920s onwards. These terms need to be used with

caution, as they can imply that the cinema of the early years was only there as a precursor

of Hollywood and the classical style which followed. In fact the styles of filmmaking

prevalent in the early years were never entirely displaced by Hollywood or classical

modes, even in America, and many cinemas went on being pre- or at any rate non-

Hollywood in their practices for many years to come. But it remains true that much of the

development that took place in the years from 1906 or 1907 can be seen as laying the

foundation for what was to become the Hollywood system, in both formal and industrial

terms.

For the purposes of this book, therefore, we have divided the period into two. The first

half, from the beginnings up to about 1906, we have simply called early cinema, while the

second half, from 1907 to the mid-1910s, we have designated transitional since it forms a