The forefront of achievement during the silent the late forefront of cinematic achievement during the silent era. In the late 1910s and the early 1920s, the best films of Victor Sjöström, Mauritz Stiller and Carl Theodor Dreyer achieved an almost unequalled delicacy and naturalism. However, with the coming of sound and the growing dominance of Hollywood, the sparsely populated Nordic countries became linguistically and culturally isolated.
Victor David Sjöström
Finnish-Swedish actor Mauritz Stiller photographed by Arnold Genthe.
Carl Theodor Dreyer by Erling Mandelmann.
By the late 1940s, though, Scandinavia-especially Sweden-was again making creative films; film historian Peter Cowie has claimed: ‘Probably no other nation of the comparative population has matched the artistic success of Sweden in the cinema’. Central to that success was the photogenic beauty of its rural and urban landscapes and the contrast between its austere Lutheran traditions and its 20th-century evolution into a pacific, secular social democracy.
Two small promotional flyers for the American presentation of the film ‘Sommaren med Monika’
This is the DVD cover art of ‘Summer Interlude’. The cover art copyright is believed to belong to the publisher of the video or the studio which produced the video.
Death and Antonius Block choose sides for the chess game. ‘Det sjunde inseglet’
Novelist Ulla Isaksson wrote the screenplay of ‘Jungfrukällan‘, particularly interested in questions of faith.
Ingmar Bergman (L) and Victor Sjöström (R) in 1957, during production of Wild Strawberries in the studios in Solna.
These concerns found expression during the 1950s in the work of Ingmar Bergman. His finest early films, ‘Sommarlek’ and ‘Sommaren med Monika’, were melancholy romances, set against the backdrop of the Stockholm archipelago, the wild and temporary seasonal beauty of which reflected the transience of love. Such films were in a traditional Swedish vein, also typified by ‘Hon Dansade en sommar’ by Arne Mattsson. another tragic love story set against a rural backdrop. Bergman then moved towards allegory and existentialism in ‘Det sjunde inseglet’. Despite the medieval setting and fantasy premise, it addressed the very 20th-century dilemma of the man without faith seeking meaning in life. In ‘Jungfrukällan’, Bergman revisited medieval times, exploring Scandinavia’s dual heritage of paganism and Christianity. ‘Smultronstället’ was a gentler, more realistic account of an old man taking stock of his life, prefiguring the more psychological emphasis of Bergman’s 1960s work.
Alf Sjöberg has been unjustly overshadowed by the two outstanding Swedish artists with whom he was associated. His best-known film abroad, ‘Hets’, was scripted by Bergman, who has taken the credit for its bleak psychological undercurrents, although the claustrophobic atmosphere is surely down to its director. During the 1950s, Sjöberg adapted works by Sweden’s greatest playwright, August Strindberg, realizing a memorable version of ‘Fröken Julie’ and an innovative, rather playful historical film in ‘Karin Månsdotter’, based on Strindberg’s ‘Erik XIV’. Little known outside Sweden, Hasse Ekman deserves greater fame for ‘Flicka och hyacinter’, a haunting story about an investigation into a girl’s suicide. The film showed the unusual sexual frankness of post-war Swedish cinema, while subtly probing the compromises made by Sweden to remain neutral during World War II. Also notable was the work of Arne Sucksdorff who creatively melded fiction and documentary.
Denmark’s greatest director, Carl Theodor Dreyer, made only one film in the 1950s. ‘Ordet’ was, however, a masterpiece, an austere yet humane parable whose miraculous elements were beautifully undercut by the subtle realism of the performances and settings. The decade also saw the emergence of Gabriel Axel, later to achieve international fame with ‘Babettes gæstebud’. His feature debut, ‘Altid Ballade’, was a charming realist account of a working-class family.
Norway’s most talented filmmaker was Arne Skouen, whose ‘Ni liv’ won international acclaim and an Oscar nomination. It is a tense and skilfully crafted account of the wartime flight of a Resistance fighter to neutral Sweden. Debuting with the chilling ‘Døden er et kjærtegn’, Norway’s first female director, Edith Carlmar, sustained a career through the 1950s. Her final film, the rites of passage story ‘Ung flukt’, marked the first appearance of actress Liv Ullmann.
Notable Finnish works included ‘Valkoinen peura’ , a Lapp folk tale adapted for cinema by Erik Blomberg, which made impressive use of the Nordic scenery, and the war film ‘Tuntematon sotilas’ by Edvin Laine, which remains the highest-grossing Finnish film.
Wandering Musicians by Italian neorealist artist Bruno Caruso (1953).
The term ‘Neo-Realism’ (Italian: Neorealismo) was first coined by Italian critics in the early 1940s, Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini was one of the key writers of the Neo-Realist movement and one of its main theorists. He called on filmmakers to take to the streets, get on to buses and trams and to ‘steal’ their stories from every day, writing in his wartime diary, Sequences from a Cinematic Life: Set up a camera in the street, in a room, see with insatiable patience, train ourselves in the contemplation of our fellow man in his elementary actions. Zavattini went on to script such films as ‘Ladri di biciclette’, ‘Umberto D’, and ‘Miracolo a Milano’, all of which focus on the hardships ordinary people encounter in contemporary Italy. Italian cinema of the Neo-Realist period is full of stories of people trying to solve everyday problems. This was a reaction to the style of the ‘Telefono Bianco’ movies of the 1930s that emulated Hollywood films and focused on bourgeois society. Neo-Realist films often used non-professional actors and were filmed on location in poor areas, depicting people performing mundane daily activities, with the emphasis on gritty realism and a sense of rough energy.
Cesare Zavattini (photo by Paolo Monti, 1975)
‘Ossessione’, directed by Luchino Visconti, is sometimes cited as the first Neo-Realist film, although it is a movie with strong noirish elements. Its screenplay is based on James M. Cain’s crime novel ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’. Visconti worked on it with fellow writers and filmmakers from the magazine Cinema, among them Giuseppe De Santis. It is a seamy tale set in provincial Italy about a tramp who has an affair with the wife of a restaurant owner; the lovers plot to kill the husband. Visconti faced censorship problems with the film, which was banned in Fascist Italy.
Neo-Realist protagonists range from the very young to the very old. ‘Umberto D‘, directed by Vittorio De Sica is about an elderly man (Carlo Battisti) reduced to poverty but clinging desperately to his dignity. He potters around Rome with his one loyal companion, his dog. By contrast, children have prominent roles in ‘Ladri di biciclette’ and ‘Miracolo a Milano’. However, Neo-Realist directors did not always take a documentary-style approach to the material. For example, De Sica’s ‘Miracolo a Milano’, concerning a homeless group in a shantytown on the outskirts of post-war Milan, might well be described as ‘magical realist. Alongside its digs at greedy landowners and venal squatters, the film has a strong fantasy element. Nor did all Neo-Realist films use non-professional actors. ‘Roma, città aperta’ , by Roberto Rossellini, features Anna Magnani, one of Italian cinema’s biggest post-war stars, and the actor, writer and director Aldo Fabrizi. ‘Roma, città aperta’ won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and had an immediate impact. Movie myth suggests that the director made it with ‘short ends’-scraps of film stock given to him by camera-wielding US soldiers who had liberated Rome in World War II. His shooting style was determined by the constraints under which he was working. Scenes were shot rapidly with abrupt cutting. Rossellini was inspired by his own experiences hiding from Nazi patrols out to press-gang young Italians into fighting for the Fascists. The idea that he made the movie on the hoof is exaggerated. Nonetheless, it has a roughness and energy that have come to be seen as Neo-Realist hallmarks.
Anna Magnani as Pina in a famous scene from the film.
A plaque in Rome commemorating the film’s production.
Rossellini went on to make ‘Paisà’, a sprawling war film about the end of the war in Italy. This was followed by the brutal ‘Germania anno zero’ set in rubble-strewn, burnt-out Berlin and detailing the plight of a boy struggling to survive in the wake of the Nazi defeat.
There is a big difference between the films in Rossellini’s war trilogy and his work with Ingrid Bergman in ‘Stromboli’. This is a strange and eerie story about a young Lithuanian emigrée who marries an Italian fisherman to escape a displaced person’s camp at the end of the war. She goes to live with him on a remote island and finds herself bewildered and oppressed by the patriarchal society she encounters.
By the early 1950s, Neo-Realist cinema in Italy no longer had the urgency that characterized the movement in the immediate post-war years. Conditions had changed; Italian society was more affluent and filmmakers were less concerned about portraying those on the margins. Yet Neo-Realism’s influence was wide, and Cinema Novo in Brazil, Free Cinema in Britain, the French Nouvelle Vague and the cinema-vérité movement in documentary were all indebted to the work of directors such as De Sica and Rossellini in the 1940s.
Two silhouetted figures in ‘The Big Combo’. The film’s cinematographer was John Alton, the creator of many of film noir’s stylized images.
Film Noir is a slippery concept to define. Is it a genre, a style, an atmosphere, a mood or a look? Must a Film Noir be shot in black and white? Film historians have argued about these and related issues for years without ever arriving at a consensus, which may be diluting the concept beyond reason. Most critics, however, would accept that noir western (Pursued), noir costume dramas (The Black Book), and even the occasional British noir film (Night and the City), can be legitimately admitted to the canon.
Deciding when Hollywood noir started is equally problematic. Its origins are traced back to the shadowy, angled, paranoid world of German Expressionism. and certainly such refugees from Nazism as Fritz Lang, Karl Freund and Robert Siodmak brought with them visual and thematic elements that fed into and darkened, the Hollywood mainstream. This generation of European filmmakers recognized the medium’s potential to create complex psychological effects while exploiting controversial subject matter – something already intrinsic to the work of directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, who produced his debut noir, ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ in 1943. Fritz Lang’s ‘M’, about serial child killer, is among one of the earliest crime films to marry a noirish visual style with a noir-type plot. The German thriller starred the archetypal noir actor Peter Lorre in an insidiously disturbing performance; it also featured a voice-over narration, a device that was to become a hallmark of the genre. Another of Lang’s films, ‘You Only Live Once’, with its doomed young couple (Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney) on the run from fate and the law, also seems to prefigure aspects of Film Noir. Yet neither of these works conveys the sense of existential claustrophobia, of all-enveloping duplicity that distinguishes the quintessential noir.
Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert, gazing into a shop window. Fritz Lang uses glass and reflections throughout the film for expressive purposes.
Another candidate sometimes proposed as the first Hollywood Film Noir is ‘Stranger on the Third Floor’, a twisty, atmospheric thriller, again starring the European exile Peter Lorre. Yet ‘Stranger on the Third Floor’ was only a 64-minute B-movie, directed by the little-known Boris Ingster, despite being photographed by Nicholas Musuraca, one of noir’s finest cinematographers, it exerted little influence at the time. The film with the strongest claim to have kicked off the Hollywood noir cycle is the crime thriller ‘The Maltese Falcon’, although its makers had no intention of starting a trend, let alone inaugurating one of the most analyzed. admired and influential cycles in the history of cinema.
‘Stranger on the Third Floor‘ is often cited as the first “true” film noir of the classic period (1940–1959), though other films that fit the genre such as ‘Rebecca’ and ‘They Drive by Night‘ were released earlier. Nonetheless, it has many of the hallmarks of film noir: an urban setting, heavy shadows, diagonal lines, voice-over narration, a dream sequence, low camera angles shooting up multi-story staircases, and an innocent protagonist desperate to clear himself after being falsely accused of a crime.
The film premiered in New York City on October 3, 1941, and was nominated for three Academy Awards. Considered one of the greatest films of all time, it was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress to be included in the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. It is a part of Roger Ebert’s series The Great Movies and was cited by Panorama du Film Noir Américain as the first major film noir.
The elusiveness of the genre can be traced partly to the fact that it became known as noir only after the event. The concept is an ex-post-facto historical construct, akin to expressions such as the ‘Middle Ages’. Filmmakers who created Westerns, or swashbucklers, or biopics knew exactly what conventions they were working in; few, if any, of the people who made noir films would have referred to their work as such The concept ‘Film Noir’ was devised by French movie critics who, noting a new trend emerging in the US movies that reached France en masse after the German occupation in World War II, named it after the popular policier imprint known as ‘Serie Noire’. The term was coined to denote a dark and downbeat underworld of crime and corruption: French Critic Nino Frank first used the term in 1946. However outside France, the words ‘Film Noir’ did not enter popular parlance until the 1960s.
The classic period of Hollywood Film Noir coincides with the war years and the post-war anti-Communist witch-hunt. Noir, with its pervasive atmosphere of fear and paranoia and sense of hopeless fatalism, presents an oblique response to the political climate of the time. In many noir films, it is possible to detect anxiety about the conflict engulfing Europe, which would eventually draw in the United States-or, in later years, about the Cold War claustrophobia choking the whole country as well as the threat of nuclear annihilation. John Huston made ‘The Maltese Falcon’ before the United States entered World War II; yet within it can be detected, submerged beneath the private eye conventions, an apprehension of events in Europe. ‘The Third Man’, directed by Carol Reed and set and filmed in post-war Vienna, is steeped in the messy aftermath of World War II and reflects the prevailing ambience of anxiety, pessimism and suspicion. Occupied Vienna is ruled by four different military powers, while a black market drugs racket plagues the devastated city Urban landscapes often provided the setting for Film Noir. The shadowy wet streets of the metropolis provided the perfect setting for the nightmarish events and uneasy atmosphere of noir.
Orson Welles in The Third Man: ‘dominates the film both by his presence and his absence’.
Favorite noir techniques included low-key chiaroscuro lighting. odd camera angles, the use of flashbacks, first-person voice-over narration, sharp wisecracking dialogue and non-linear plotlines, Cinematographers of the era such as Nicholas Musuraca John F Seitz and John Alton, used expressionist lighting to create mood and heighten tension Arthur Edeson in particular is credited with creating the classic noir look. He shot his first feature in 9i4 and went on to film several of Douglas Fairbanks’s swashbucklers and the early sound movie ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. Also in the 1930s he photographed classic Universal horror films directed by James Whale, ‘The Old Dark House’ and ‘The Invisible Man’, whose combination of German Expressionism with shadowy got mood and tongue-in-cheek melodrama was to establish the template for horror movies In 1941, Edeson was director of photography on ‘The Maltese Falcon’.
The plots and themes of Film Noir have their pulp novels and crime fiction of the period, whose tone carried over to resulting dialogue ‘Double Indemnity’, another noir classic was adapted by director Billy Wilder and author Raymond Chandler from the novel by James M. Cain. Chandler’s writing inspired several mar noirs, including ‘The Big Sleep’.
This is the front cover art for the book ‘The Big Sleep’ written by Raymond Chandler. The book cover art copyright is believed to belong to the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, or the cover artist.
In ‘Double Indemnity’, Walter Nerfed (Fred MacMurray) opens his narration with the line “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” Neff becomes embroiled in a murder plot by the scheming Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). Noir females are archetypes: either dutiful loving women or femmes fatales-gorgeous, mysterious, double-crossing and ready to do anything to stay on top.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the tone of Film Noir deepened. The shadows grew gloomier and more encroaching, the highlights brasher and more hysterical, and the camera angles more vertiginous, while the sense of fatalism intensified and became ever more internalized. ‘Fate or some mysterious force’ muses the hero of ‘Detour’, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all other traumas of the period clouded the texture anti-Communist paranoia, disorientation and the post-war mood of emptiness. ‘Crossfire’ flags up the potential for violence in de-mobbed veterans, the lingering specter of Nazism emerges in ‘Notorious’; a nagging worry about what wives and girlfriends got up to on the home front festers in ‘The Blue Dahlia’; and alcoholism, an increasing problem in post-war America, all but wipes out the hero of ‘The Lost Weekend’.
The audacious ‘Touch of Evil’ by Orson Welles marks the end of the US Film-Noir cycle. A lurid tale of corruption in a sleazy border town, it features Charlton Heston as an honorable Mexican narcotics agent, Marlene Dietrich as a cigar-smoking bordello madam and Welles as a degenerate US cop. The film is famed for its 3-minute unbroken opening shot and its final chase, featuring extravagant visual and experimental sound effects.
As the United States slipped deeper into the neuroses of the Cold War, noir’s downbeat, doom-laden visions seemed like a riposte, a disenchanted flipside to the optimism and flag-waving piety of much of Hollywood’s output Those patriotic parades on Main Street had their sardonic counterpart in the mean streets, the brighter the lights and the louder the drums, the darker the shadows and the more hollow the echoes. As film historian Colin McArthur commented, “The meanings spoken by Film Noir are not social relating to the problems of a particular society, but metaphysical, having to do with angst and loneliness as essential elements of the human condition”.
U.S. Navy Douglas SBD-3 “Dauntless” dive bombers from scouting squadron VS-8 from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) approaching the burning Japanese heavy cruiser Mikuma to make the third set of attacks on her, during the Battle of Midway, 6 June 1942.
In June 1942 Lieutenant Commander John Ford USNR was wounded by shrapnel while standing on an atoll in the Pacific with a 16mm hand-held camera filming Japanese planes attacking. His footage became part of the documentary short ‘The Battle of Midway’. Ford claimed that his role was to bring news of the war to the home front: ‘It’s for the mothers of America, it is to let them know that we’re in this war and that we’ve been getting the shit kicked out of us for five months and now we’re starting to hit back.’
The Battle of Midway
The Battle of Midway is a 1942 American short documentary film directed by John Ford. It is a montage of color footage of the Battle of Midway with voice overs of various narrators, including Johnny Governali, Donald Crisp, Henry Fonda, and Jane Darwell.
When the United States Navy sent director John Ford to Midway Island in 1942, he believed that the military wanted him to make a documentary on life at a small, isolated military base, and filmed casual footage of the sailors and marines there working and having fun. Two days before the battle, he learned that the Japanese planned to attack the base and that it was preparing to defend itself. Ford’s handheld, 16mm footage of the battle was captured impromptu. He had been in transit on the island, roused from his bunk by the sounds of the battle, and started filming. Ford was wounded by enemy fire while filming the battle. Acclaimed as a hero when he returned home because of the footage and the minor wound, Ford decades later incorrectly claimed to Peter Bogdanovich that he was the only cameraman; however, Jack Mackenzie Jr. and Kenneth Pier assisted Ford in filming.
During World War II many of cinema’s talents were involved in the war effort, and the best films raised wartime propaganda to the level of popular art. In Britain Humphrey Jennings brought poetry to the documentary with his vision of life on the home front, ‘Listen to Britain’. The debut feature ‘In Which We Serve’ by David Lean and co-directed with Noel Coward, is the fictionalized account of a ship told through the memories of its shipwrecked crew. ‘Went the Day Well?’ by Alberto Cavalcanti shows a sleepy English hamlet transformed into a bloodbath when its villagers take up arms and turn on their Nazi captors.
British Soldiers singing, a scene from the sort ‘Listen to Britian’.
A scene from ‘In which we serve’.
A scene from ‘Went the Day Well?’
In Germany, much of the propaganda meant demonization. ‘Jud Suss’ (left) commissioned by Joseph Goebbels and directed by Veit Harlan, took Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel of 1925 and Wilhelm Hauft’s novella of 1827 and twisted them into virulent anti-Semitic propaganda ‘Feldzug in Polen’(below left) by Fritz Hippler, a documentary made after the invasion of Poland, was designed to show Poles as aggressors against Germany.
‘Triumph of the Will’(below center) is a Nazi propaganda film directed, produced, edited, and co-written by Leni Riefenstahl(below right, seen with Hitler). It chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters. The film contains excerpts from speeches given by Nazi leaders at the Congress, including Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, and Julius Streicher, interspersed with footage of massed Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel troops and public reaction.
With the Axis forces approaching Moscow, Eisenstein was one of many Moscow-based filmmakers who were evacuated to Alma Ata, in the Kazakh SSR. There, Eisenstein first considered the idea of making a film about Tsar Ivan IV, aka ‘Ivan the Terrible’. Aware of Eisenstein’s interest in a project about Ivan, Stalin ordered the making of the film with Eisenstein as author-director. It was Eisenstein’s last film, commissioned by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who admired and identified with Ivan. Part I was released in 1944 while Part II was not released until 1958, as it was banned on the order of Stalin, who became incensed over the depiction of Ivan therein. Eisenstein had developed the scenario to require the third party to finish the story but, with the banning of Part II, filming of Part III was stopped after Eisenstein’s death in 1948, what had been completed of Part III was destroyed.
In 1940 Italy and Spain co-produced ‘Lassedio dell Alcazar’,(left) directed by Augusto Genina, a feature created to show the heroism of Francisco Franco’s soldiers through a fictionalized account of the siege of Alcazar by Republican forces. The great exponent of post-war Neo-Realism. Roberto Rossellini made a trilogy to help the Italian war effort between 1941 and 1943: ‘La nave bianca’ (below left)a drama sponsored by the propaganda arm of the Italian Navy. ‘Un pilota ritorna’(below center) about an Italian pilot interned in a British prison, and ‘L’uomo dalla croce’(below right), about Italy’s efforts on the Eastern Front in 1942.
The United States joined the war in 1941, but many films prior to that criticized isolationism, and ‘Foreign Correspondent’ by Alfred Hitchcock sent an emotional message from bombed London to the then neutral United States. After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood waded into the Axis powers with gusto in such films as ‘Hangmen Also Die’ and ‘Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo’. Frank Capra made ‘Why We Fight’, a series of documentaries explaining war policy to the troops that were also released to the public. The documentary short about the Italian campaign ‘San Pietro’ by John Huston was so realistic that initially, the authorities blocked its release. When Russia became an ally against the powers, Hollywood was pressure to make pro-Soviet movies. ‘Mission to Moscow’ is notorious for its sympathetic depiction of Joseph Stalin. ‘The North Star’ directed by Lewis Milestone features Russian partisans singing lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Yet, by the end of the war Russia was the enemy and both films came under scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Joel McCrea as “John Jones,” ‘Foreign correspondent’
Theatrical release poster. ‘The North Star’
1943 half-height theatrical poster for ‘Hangmen Also Die’
Joseph Stalin (Manart Kippen) greets U.S. ambassador Joseph E. Davies (Walter Huston) in ‘Mission to Moscow’.
“The Ruptured Duck” flies over a burning target in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo.
Prelude to War depicts the Nazi propaganda machine.
Still from the motion picture ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, directed by Lewis Milestone and featuring Lew Ayres (left).
In 1930 ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, a humanitarian World War drama directed by Lewis Milestone and based on the best selling novel by Erich Maria Remarque, reflected the feelings of a generation of Americans who agreed with the words of the song ‘I Didn’t Raise My Son to be a Soldier’. The film shows the conflict from the German side, and its villains are the politicians and civilians who use patriotism as an excuse to send young men to the front to die pointlessly.
Im Westen nichts Neues
Im Westen nichts Neues transl. ‘Nothing New in the West’ is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers’ extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.
In 1930, the book was adapted as an Academy-Award-winning film of the same name, directed by Lewis Milestone.
‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’ is an American anti-war song that was influential within the pacifist movement that existed in the United States before it entered World War I. Lyricist Alfred Bryan collaborated with composer Al Piantadosi in writing the song.
The film appealed to the sentiments of people who remembered the horrors of the ‘war to end all wars’. Star Lew Ayres became so personally committed to pacifism that his career was later hindered by the revelation that he remained an honest objector during World War I when the national mood had changed. For much of the 1930s, despite news from Europe and Asia, films such as ‘The Man Who Reclaimed His Head’ depicted world war as an evil fostered by crooked politicians, corrupt armaments dealers, and small-minded bigots.
A publicity photo of Lew Ayres during the 1940’s.Theatrical release poster of the film ‘The Man Who Reclaimed his Head’ starring Claude Rains, Joan Bennett, and Wallace Ford.
The rise of Nazism disturbed many in Hollywood Ironically, predominantly Jewish studio heads had a personal style that might have disposed them to admire Fascism-Columbia picture’s Harry Cohn modeled his office after Benito Mussolini’s-if it were not for the anti-Semitism that came along with it Producers such as Cohn, Walt Disney, and Louis B. Mayer would have been in the 1950s, were much happier battling Communists whom they saw as a personal threat than the Fascists.
Harry Cohn during a screening in his office.
Disney with Mickey Mouse.
Mayer with Joan Crawford at the premiere of ‘Torch Song’, in 1953.
Hollywood Anti-Nazi league
The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was founded in Los Angeles in 1936 by Otto Katz and others to organize members of the American film industry to oppose fascism and Nazism. Although it was a communist front organization, run by the American popular front, it attracted broad support in Hollywood from both members and nonmembers of the Communist Party USA. Like many such communist front groups, it ceased all anti-Nazi activities immediately upon the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939.
Fredric March and his wife Florence with Helga and Hubertus zu Löwenstein (far right), co-founder of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, July 1936.
Leni Riefenstahl with Joseph Goebbels in 1937, around the time, that her visit to Los Angeles was boycotted by the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.
Hollywood also hoped to secure the earnings of their films in Europe. Intellectual and inflammatory anti-Hollywood rhetoric from left and right was not untinged with anti-Semitism in the 1930s, and the studio heads mostly wanted to keep quiet about politics and religion When Warner Brothers courageously made ‘The Life of Emile Zola’, which chronicles the French writer’s involvement in the Dreyfus case, Dreyfus’s Jewishness was barely mentioned. However, the popularity of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ ironically forced Hollywood to make more films addressing the current state of Germany in the hope of reproducing the success of the original.
Paul Muni & Gloria Holden from the film ‘ The Life of Emile Zola’.
‘The Road Back’, ‘Three Comrades’, and ‘The Mortal Storm’ are all official or unofficial follow-ups to ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ and show post-war Germany turning violently to the political right. ‘The Mortal Storm’ hits on a key image for romantic Hollywood anti-Fascism as idealized young lovers are hemmed in and persecuted by aggressors shown as a forest of stiff, raised arms.
‘The Road Back’ is a 1937 American drama war film directed by James Whale, starring John King, Richard Cromwell, and Slim Summerville with a supporting cast featuring Andy Devine, Louise Fazenda, Noah Beery Jr., Lionel Atwill, Spring Byington, and Al Shean.
Three Comrades is a 1938 drama film directed by Frank Borzage and produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz for MGM. The screenplay is by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edward E. Paramore Jr. and was adapted from the novel ‘Three Comrades’ by Erich Maria Remarque.
The Mortal Storm is a 1940 drama film from MGM directed by Frank Borzage and starring Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart.
Warner Bros. First National Studios, Burbank, c. 1928
Warner Brothers were the most anti-Nazi Hollywood studio, shutting down its Berlin operation-reputedly because anti-Semitic thugs murdered their German representative. In 1939 the studio produced the rebellious ‘Confessions of a Nazi Spy’, a based-on-fact exposé of German spy activity in the United States that takes a swipe at the Nazi leanings of the German American Bund. Another world war seemed inevitable, and the movie industry responded with films about it. ‘Idiot’s Delight’, based on Robert Sherwood’s play, is about Americans caught in Europe at the outbreak of war and was in theatres only months before the situation it depicts came to pass. The intimation is that US involvement in the conflict is inevitable.
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
Confessions of a Nazi Spy is a 1939 American spy thriller film. It was the first blatantly anti-Nazi film to be produced by a major Hollywood studio. The film stars Edward G. Robinson, Francis Lederer, George Sanders, Paul Lukas, and a large cast of German actors, including some who had emigrated from their country after the rise of Adolf Hitler. Many of the German actors who appeared in the film changed their names for fear of reprisals against relatives still living in Germany.
Screenwriter John Wexley based his script on real events and the articles of former FBI agent Leon G. Turrou, who had been active in investigating Nazi spy rings in the United States before the war, and lost his position at the Bureau when he published the articles without permission. Authors Paul Buhle and David Wagner of Radical Hollywood wrote that it “treated a real-life case” and that Warner Brothers had been warned by the Dies Committee “against slurring a ‘friendly country'”.
‘Idiot’s Delight’ is a 1939 MGM comedy-drama with a screenplay adapted by Robert E. Sherwood from his 1936 Pulitzer-Prize-winning play of the same name. The movie showcases Clark Gable, in the same year that he played Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind and Norma Shearer in the declining phase of her career. Although not a musical, it is notable as the only film where Gable sings and dances, performing “Puttin’ on the Ritz” by Irving Berlin.
US isolationists were highly critical of the way Hollywood weighed in on the British side in the early days of the war, especially when British directors such as Charlie Chaplin, and Alfred Hitchcock were concerned. Sensitive to these complaints that Hollywood was producing pro-war anti-Nazi propaganda, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer backed one inherently pro-Axis movie ‘Florian’, an illustrative drama about the training of Austria’s Lipizzaner horses, in which a loving disciplinarian brings together disparate animals and whips the stable into shape, defused by Robert Young as a scarcely credible Hitler stand-in.
1941, Hollywood was arguably on a better footing to fight a war than the US military or any defense-related industry. Resigned to the loss of European markets, in line with US President Roosevelt’s ‘Good Neighbor Policy’, the industry would make attempts as varied as the doomed, unfinished ‘It’s All True’ by Orson Welles and Twentieth Century Fox’s Carmen Miranda musicals to court South and Central American markets Even before the entry of the United States into the war, Hollywood was in production on several propagandist efforts. Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, Hollywood would be making patriotic war movies.
French cinema in the 1930s is particularly associated with the iconic figure of star Jean Gabin and the Poetic Realist films made later in the decade. The origin of these films can be traced back to the confusion produced by the introduction of talkies in 1929. At that time, French filmmaking was known principally for its visual and formal innovation. The guiding principle of its outstanding films was the Romantic idea of the artist-author as a talented genius. In Paris, the largely Surrealist-inspired avant-garde created a climate in which the narrative norms of Hollywood did not hold sway. At first, the French industry took protectionist measures, believing that synchronized dialogue would make English-speaking Hollywood uncompetitive. However, the two once-dominant French studios, Pathé and Gaumont, had become weak conglomerates, in no position to exploit the situation with an economic depression now in full swing. When in 1930 a US-German cartel deal was struck, Paramount was quick to equip its Joinville studio to crank out ‘canned theatre’-French-language copies of Hollywood successes.
Among the first to film in sound was René Clair. His fluid use of sound and image made the silent to sound transition look easy. Clair filled his elaborate, hugely successful films with images that mask or comment diagonally on the sound source, and song sequences that could be mimed. The prestige productions ‘Sous les toits de Paris’, ‘Le million’, ‘A nous la liberté’ and ‘Quatorze Juillet’ are light-hearted films that create an imaginary old Paris of great charm, which fed French audiences’ hunger for fun-filled nostalgia and brought Clair international fame.
With approximately 4.000 mostly individually owned, cinemas to re-equip at great expense, France took longer to convert to sound than the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain, and French cinema owners were vulnerable to Hollywood distributors’ exclusive deals. Soon, a quarter of films shown in French either originated from or had been made abroad. Caught in a vice between Hollywood and Germany’s principal film studio UFA, French producers had to invent, at speed a new national cinema with popular appeal. Their solution was to import theatre and vaudeville stars, and the playwrights and directors with whom they worked, and make farces, melodrama and military comedies that had the advantage of already being well-loved as plays. By the second half of the decade, a mere ten jobbing directors were responsible for more than a quarter of the French films released from 1936 to 1938. Even more than directorial influence, it was the personae of comic singers Fernandel, Georges Milton and Charles-Joseph Bach’ Pasquier, of popular actors including Raimu, Arletty, Harry Baur, Jules Berry, Michel Simon, and Louis Jouvet, and of young actresses such as Michèle Morgan and Annabella that set the tone of French cinema.
Publicity photo of Michèle Morgan for ‘The Chase’.
French singer and actor Georges Milton waving to the crowd after singing at the Richelieu-Drouot crossroads in Paris.
Marcel Pagnol.
Playwright Marcel Pagnol was an early convert and in 1934 built his studio in his home city of Marseilles. Initially he wrote screenplays of his stage hits, although he did both write and direct the final part of his Marseilles trilogy. ‘César’, which capitalized on the success of his play ‘Marius‘. The best films he directed were derived from the novels of Jean Giono and were at least partly shot on location, a radical move at the time Pagnol even built the village of Aubignane for ‘Regain’.
1936 poster for ‘César’ showing Fanny and Marius.
Remastered lobby card for the film ‘Regain’.
Sacha Guitry, an equally famous dramatist, had written some silent shorts in the 1920s but it was in 1936 when he conceived his form of ‘filmed theatre’ that his career as a director took off. From then on he made light, humorous films starring himself and featuring taut dialogue, such as ‘Le roman d’un tricheur’, ‘Faisons un reve’, ‘Désiré’ and ‘Quadrille’.
French actor, director, screenwriter and playwright Sacha Guitry.
A scene from ‘A propos de Nice’.
One sheet poster for ‘Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables au collége’.
Jean Dasté and Dita Parlo in the wedding scene, which was the first scene shot. (L’Atalante)
Jean Vigo was more of a cinephile maverick. He made highly personal films, such as his documentary ‘A propos de Nice’ that depicts a city haunted by images of death. Shot while he was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him, his ‘Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables au collége‘ is a satirical portrait of a boarding school, and was banned. Neither film lasts an hour, but Vigo made one feature, ‘L’Atalante’, which depicts the honeymoon of a newly wed couple on a barge and became a landmark in cinema by establishing the Poetic Realism school.
Vigo was already dead and Guitry’s film career hardly begun when French cinema hit a mid-decade low. Pathe and Gaumont almost collapsed and Paramount’s French production activities were wound up Overnight, French production became a unreliable cottage industry, even more dependent on co-productions. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 did not stop, for instance, the anti-Fascist Jean Grémillon whose flop ‘la petite Lise’ was arguably a forerunner of Poetic Realism-from working in Berlin.
In fact with a few exceptions, French cinema in the 1930s largely ignored the political struggles that broke out on the streets of Paris with the Fascist riots of February 1934 and the happier Bastille Day demonstration in 1935 that cemented the socialist Popular Front alliance.
Hitler’s racist policies saw the German industry lose much of the native talent that had produced its recent flowering with films such as ‘Die 3-Groschen Oper’ by G. W. Pabst, ‘M’ by Fritz Lang, and ‘Liebelei’ by Max Ophüls. Many of the best German directors including Pabst. Lang. Ophuls, Douglas Sirk, Robert Siodmak, and Billy, Wilder had émigré visits in France, which may have been crucial to French cinema’s upturn in quality from the middle of the decade onwards. German cinematographers Eugen Schüfftan and Curt Courant, in particular, helped Marcel Carné move cinema into the shadowy streets.
The Poetic Realist school of gritty nocturnal dramas of doomed romance set in a working-class background that perhaps began with ‘La petite Lise’, developed by Belgian born Pierre Chenal in ‘La rue sans nom’. However, it was another Belgian born director, veteran Jacques Feyder, assisted by Carné, who first set the new standard of quality in ‘Le grand jeu’, a romantic drama about a man who joins the French Foreign Legion and becomes obsessed with a woman who looks identical to the girl he left behind.
Actor Jean Gabin came to represent the tragic face of Poetic Realism. He first found fame in three films by Julien Duvivier. In ‘La bandera’, Gabin plays a murderer who joins the Spanish Foreign Legion. In ‘La belle équipe’ he is in a cartel of unemployed workers who buy a winning lottery ticket and open a restaurant together with uneasy results. In ‘Pépé le Moko’, Gabin plays a gangster hiding in Algiers casbah lured to his doom by the love of a tourist from Paris. Duvivier carried this sense of foreboding into two later films about regret. ‘Un carnet de bal’ again stars Bell as a widow seeking out former lovers, and ‘La fin du jour’, which is set in a retired actors’ home. The acceptance of these films matched the mood of a country that saw the Popular Front win power in 1936, only to lose it again a year later.
Theatrical poster for ‘La Bandera’.
A scene from ‘La belle equipe’.
Theatrical poster for ‘Pépé le Moko’.
Poster for ‘Un Carnet de Bal’
‘La fin du jour’ poster.
Jean Renoir, a veteran of silent films, was a humanist with Communist leanings. He found success with ‘La chienne’ in which Michel Simon’s bank cashier kills his whore lover and lets her pimp take the rap. However, it was Renoir’s films made later in the decade that established his reputation in ‘Le crime de Monsieur Lange’, scripted by Leftist poet Jacques Prévert, a publishing collective is threatened by the return of its scoundrel owner, who is then murdered. ‘La grande illusion’ stars Gabin and Erich von Stroheim and critiques World War Through the relationship between three French prisoners of war and their German prison camp commander. ‘La bête humaine’ is based on an Emile Zola novel about a crime of passion and once more stars Gabin as the fated individual. All three films mark Renoir as a master, although it is ‘La règle du jeu’, describing a weekend’s fun among the bourgeois rich and their servants, that marks the summit of his achievement in the decade.
The finest exponent of Poetic Realism was Carné. He formed a firm bond with Prévert on ‘Drôle de drame ou L’étrange aventure du Docteur Molyneux’, an excellent actors piece starring Louis Jouvet as an interfering bishop, but their collaboration combined with ‘Le quai des brumes’. Gabin plays opposite Michèle Morgan, as an army deserter who falls for a seventeen-year-old orphan in a misty dockside location and then pays for his moment of happiness, in an atmosphere saturated with defeatism. The equally doom-laden romance in poverty drama ‘Hotel du Nord’ was made without Prévert and is less convincing. However, ‘Le jour se léve’ is perhaps the supreme example of Poetic Realism. Here Gabin plays a factory worker goaded into jealousy and murder by a vile seducer, reflecting on his fate in his shabby room while the police wait below. The murderer and seducer that was Nazi Germany would soon be at France’s door, but the legacy of the nation’s classic cinema would survive it and produce Carné’s transcendent ‘Les enfants du paradis’.
Poster for the movie ‘The Jazz Singer’, featuring stars Eugenie Besserer and Al Jolson.
23 October 1927, when ‘The Jazz Singer’ made its debut in New York, as a date lauded in film history. Even though it was highly skeptical, no one could believe the seismic nature of the change sound would bring and the apocalyptic fears of those who thought that talking pictures would diminish the art of cinema.
Sound had been the aspiration since the birth of cinema. As early as 1888 Eadweard Muybridge claimed to have discussed with Thomas Alva Edison the possibility of using the Edison recorded sound process to accompany his zoopraxiscope movie projector. Throughout the silent era there were many experiments to bring mechanically recorded sound to the cinema, and two sound formats gradually evolved with sound on disc and sound on film. Although sound on disc was initially successful, with the Vitaphone process dominating the industry, it was sound on film that prevailed.
Phonograph Patent Drawing by T.A. Edison.
Black-and-white picture of a coloured zoopraxiscope disc, circa 1893 by Eadweard Muybridge and Erwin F. Faber.
A Vitaphone projection setup at a 1926 demonstration. Engineer E. B. Craft is holding a soundtrack disc. The turntable, on a massive tripod base, is at lower center.
In 1921, with ‘Dream Street’, D.W.Griffith attempted a commercial feature utilizing the sound process. Although released in a silent version, a second version premiered in New York with a spoken introduction by Griffith, as well as a sound sequence featuring a recorded song and various sound effects. Utilizing a Photokinema sound on disc process, Griffith’s experiment proved faulty because most were unable to accommodate the Photokinema equipment. The first commercial sound film opened in August 1926, when Warner Bros released ‘Don Juan’ using the Vitaphone system. Directed by Alan Crosland, ‘Don Juan’ was a swashbuckling vehicle for John Barrymore accompanied by recorded orchestral score and sound effects.
Crowd posing for the camera outside the Warners’ Theatre before the premiere of ‘Don Juan’.Lobby cards of the film ‘Dream Street’. Imaged by Heritage Auctions
It was however, Crosland’s The Jazz Singer that made the move to sound cable Modern audiences may find it hard to understand the impact of ‘The Jazz Singer’. Based on Samson Raphaelson’s stage play, this heavily sentimental account of a Jewish cantor’s son, who alienates his father through his desire to sing jazz-the film’s definition of jazz comprises sentimental show tunes and blackface (yes, racist and very offensive) is, not a talkie. There is a musical soundtrack, but, apart from two sequences, the dialogue is conveyed in titles. However, it is the two dialogue sequences that are the key to the film’s success. In mid-performance, Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) introduces the next number with stuttering enthusiasm “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” Later on, while Rabinowitz serenades his mother to Irving Berlin’s hit of 1926, ‘Blue Skies’ he breaks off to tell her that if he is a success, he is going to move her to the Bronx where there’s the Ginsbergs, the Gutenberg and the Goldbergs. Both sequences communicate a sense of immediacy and intimacy, while Jolson’s ebullient you ain’t heard nothin’ yet’ provided an irresistible strapline for the age of the talkies.
Singer and actor Al Jolson wearing blackface in the musical film ‘The Jazz Singer’.
‘Lights of New York’, a gangster melodrama from Warner Bros, was the first all-talking feature. Originally permitted to make a two-reeler, director Bryan Foy took advantage of the absence of studio heads Harry and Jack Warner to expand it into his first Full length feature film. Successful with the public as it grossed around US $1.3 million, but not with the critics, ‘Lights of New York’ became an unlikely milestone.
A shot of Helene Costello(R) and Cullen Landis(L) from a scene in ‘Lights of New York’.
In 1929 Ernst Lubitsch directed his first sound film, ‘The Love Parade’, starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, Lubitsch brought his trademark wit to a Ruritanian romance while showing that sound and music need not make the camera static. The first sound film from King Vidor, ‘Hallelujah’, was also a musical. A story based around the lives of black sharecroppers, ‘Hallelujah’ was one of the first Hollywood films to use a completely African American cast and it combined on-location recording with Hollywood post-production.
One of the most significant directors of the early sound era was Rouben Mamoulian, Starting his career as a stage director, he was courted by the studios because they needed directors who could handle dialogue. His first feature, ‘Applause’, is a groundbreaking backstage drama set in the world of burlesque, puncturing the illusion of glamour and showing a mastery of sound. The film is full of memorable moments: a chorus line whispering messages under strident music. The sequence of two lovers in a dance hall ending their relationship, their dialogue accompanied by the dramatic shadows of dancers moving on the wall behind them.
With the United States making the transition to talkies it was inevitable that the rest of the world would follow. In England, the change was more gradual, but what is considered the first British sound film is also one of its masterpieces. ‘Blackmail’ by Alfred Hitchcock was originally intended to be a silent film and exists today in both silent and sound versions. ‘Blackmail’ is a visual performance from the young Hitchcock, combining naturalistic dialogue capturing the rhythms of lower-middle-class life, with a kind of Expressionism. The latter is demonstrated in a sequence where the terrified heroine is subjected to a neighbor’s prurient monologue, which merges into a meaningless drone from which the word knife’ emerges with shocking clarity.
In France, The Jazz Singer’s premiere was not until 1929 and the evolution of sound film was much slower. While studios changed over, sound films were shot elsewhere and silent films were converted in 1930 two notable avant-garde films appeared ‘Lâge d’Or’ by Luis Buñuel and ‘Le sang d’un poète’ by Jean Cocteau. Although both films used sound experimentally, neither qualifies as a talkie. The first real French talkie, ‘Les Trois masques’, directed by André Hugon, was shot in a rented studio in England. René Clair rapidly established himself as a master of sound with a trio of highly successful films. The first of these, ‘Sous Les Toits de Paris’, is a musical set in a working-class neighborhood that opt for poetic rather than realistic dialogue. The second, ‘le million’, is a romantic farce about a missing lottery ticket. The third, the musical satire ‘A nous la liberté’, is an anarchic study of the soul-destroying regimentation of industry that presages Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin.
The coming of talkies was attended by a long list of casualties and a generational shift that constituted, perhaps, the greatest shift in the history of cinema One early casualty was Abel Gance, whose silent films, including ‘Napoléon’, had been highly successful. His science fiction film ‘La fin du monde’ had an unintelligible soundtrack that rendered the film’s dialogue incomprehensible. Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ is famous as an entertaining account of the teething problems that attended the coming of sound. From the cumbersome camera equipment, the problems of recording directly on to the microphone, and the overdubbing of unfeasible accents, the film presents a witty cavalcade of the pitfalls of early talking pictures. The fate of Singin’ in the Rain’s imperious silent-film diva, Jean Hagen, whose shrill accent contradicts her on-screen beauty was shared by a generation of stars unable to make the transition to sound.
Jean Hagen in ‘Singin’ in the Rain’.
In Germany, the arrival of sound gave a new reason for cinema in the last years of the Weimar Republic. ‘Der Blaue Engel’ by Josef von Sternberg was an early success that brought international stardom to Marlene Dietrich. Filmed simultaneously in German and English, the story of the downfall of a middle-aged schoolmaster (played by Emil Jannings) through his obsession with Dietrich’s cabaret singer Lola Lola was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Its success was helped by the inclusion of Friedrich Hollander’s mournful song ‘Falling in Love Again’ sung seductively by Dietrich at the start of the film and with remorseless froideur towards the end. The following year saw G. W. Pabst adapt Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Die 3-Groschen Oper’, which was filmed simultaneously in German and French. The first sound film by Fritz Lang was ‘M’, which also appeared in 1931. The film’s climax, in which Peter Lorre’s killer, gripped by a mixture of anguish and hysteria, tries to explain his compulsion to do evil to a self-appointed court of hardened criminals, is one of the most powerful sequences in early sound cinema and could not have exerted a fraction of the same impact if reduced to intertitles.
Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) surrounded by chorines on stage at ‘Der Blaue Engel’ cabaret.
Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert, gazing into a shop window. Fritz Lang uses glass and reflections throughout the film for expressive purposes. Screenshot from the film ‘M’.
Illustration of “Maschinenmensch” (Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1927) by Pooja Sreenivasan.
By the mid-1920s the cinema, denied speech, had developed a form of visual narration as subtle and as expressive as words. While written intertitles supplied dialogue, it was the images that truly carried the narrative and captured emotions. Unconstrained by the requirements of sound recording, the camera, which F. W. Murnau called ‘the director’s pencil’, attained flexibility that remains unsurpassed. Unable to talk, actors relied on gestures and facial expressions, achieving no less subtlety and depth of feeling than they would with the more naturalistic style that came with sound.
Murnau with Henri Matisse in Tahiti in 1930.
Silence, then, was not a limitation. For many aesthetes and film theorists, the uniqueness of cinema was precisely its ability to tell a story through images alone. Murnau’s ‘Der letzte’ Mann’ avoided intertitles, seeking to create a wholly visual narrative, and the quest for a pure cinema found disciples as far afield as Japan, where the expressionistic ‘Kurutta ippeji’ (A Page Of Madness), directed by Kinugasa Teinosuke, used only images to narrate its disorienting story of events inside a lunatic asylum.
Few films went to the lengths of eliminating intertitles, but the glory of late silent cinema was undoubtedly its visual artistry. Murnau’s ‘Faust’, despite its literary origins in the legend of the man who sells his soul to the Letzte, was most remarkable for its luminous recreation of medieval Europe. This was one of the extravagant productions by leading German studio UFA, which also made the pageant like ‘Die Nibelungen: Siegfried’ and ‘Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Rache’, by Fritz Lang, and his science-fiction epic ‘Metropolis’. Despite a decent plot, the latter remains one of cinema’s most visually impressive evocations of the future. French cinema also often aspired to an epic mode, never more so than in the work of Abel Gance, whose ‘Napoléon’ took the stylistic elaboration of silent cinema to an extreme. The emperor’s career is told in a series of set pieces, including the remarkable ‘storm in the convention’-Napoleon’s voyage on a stormy sea is juxtaposed with thunderous debates between French politicians. Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer dramatized French history in ‘La passion de Jeanne d’Arc’, but largely eschewed spectacle for a single-minded focus on the emotional registers conveyed by the human face.
Fritz Lang’s ‘Metopolis’.
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s ‘La passion de Jeanne d’Arc’.
Abel Gance’s ‘Napoleon’.
Indeed, the remarkable thing about the late silent film was its ability to combine visual grandeur with emotional intimacy. This was true of Hollywood too, where some of the best masterpieces were directed by European émigrés. Murnau came from Germany to work for Fox, and in the romantic melodrama ‘Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans’ and ‘City Girl’ he combined stylistic beauty with delicate attention to human feelings. The Swede Victor Sjöström, known for his studies of Scandinavian rural life opted for a similarly remote setting in one of the last great US silents, ‘The Wind’ a powerful melodrama shot on location in the Mojave desert.
Promotional photos of Lillian Gish for ‘The Wind’.
DVD cover art for the ‘City Girl’.
Theatrical release poster for ‘Sunrise’.
The excellence of silent film during the late 1920s helps to explain why many saw the coming of sound as a backward step. Most of ‘Lonesome’, another tale of US urban life by a European émigre, showed the flair of late silent cinema, but the mood was shattered by some common dialogue sequences.
The sound opened up new possibilities for film and by 1930 the new medium had won out in the United States and Western Europe, but it was years before filmmakers had the technology to combine sound with the visual fluency of the late silents. The point is confirmed by the outstanding work of the few mature film industries that made silent films after 1930. Until the mid-1930s, Soviet cinema produced fine silents, such as ‘Schastye’, by Alexander Medvedkin, with its blend of slapstick, satire, and folklore In Japan, where sound films were rare until 1935, directors such as Mikio Naruse and Hiroshi Shimizu fused local traditions with the flamboyant camera style learned from Western masters of late silent film, In films such as ‘Otona no miru ehon-Umarete wa mita keredo’, Yasujiro Ozu showed that silent cinema was capable of realism as authentic as hat achieved with sound in the Neo-Realist films of post-war Italy.
Hideo Sugawara, Seiichi Kato, Tomio Aoki from the film ‘Otona no miru ehon-Umarete wa mita keredo’ directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
Buster Keaton getting his foot stuck in railroad tracks at Knott’s Berry Farm in 1956.
Silent comedy, although so often associated with the stars of its ‘golden era’ such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, was, in fact, one of cinema’s earliest and most popular genres. From cinema’s very beginning a handful of films, such as L’Arroseur arrosé directed by Louis Lumière, where a gardener has a series of mishaps with his garden hose. These early experiments were a great success, but many performers who were very popular in the silent era are now largely forgotten or exist in the shadow of both Chaplin and Keaton. Harold Lloyd’s daring performance in Safety Last! and Raymond Griffith’s in Hands Up! are typical examples of well-crafted comic routines and also reminders of the way in which iconic performers can fade from public view.
Pamphlet for the film “Hands Up!”.
The iconic shot of Lloyd hanging from the clock in “Safety Last!”.
The world’s first movie poster, “L’Arroseur Arrosé”.
In the early silent period, it was in Europe that comedy began to develop the logic and form that would take it well into the 1920s, with comic actors such as André Deed and most notably the hugely popular Max Linder making early headway in the field. However, it was Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios that developed the tropes that would come to define silent comedy and began to produce comic films on an industrial scale, with his ‘Keystone Kops’ proving a favourite with audiences after the founding of the studio in 1912. Kop’s films which were often made in a matter of days and which varied immensely in quality, usually consisted of manic chase sequences featuring a series of crazed physical stunts and a cast of people humorously mismatched in size. Sennett was crucial in developing a form of on-screen comedy that relied upon a series of sight gags, reality-defying scenarios and the use of unconventional-looking character actors. Keystone films were designed to be brief, with new shorts appearing on a weekly basis, often playing upon topical themes or mimicking famous films of the day. It was Sennett, too, who developed Hollywood’s first comedy stars, with performers such as Mack Swain, Ford Sterling, Mabel Normand, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, Harry Langdon and Charlie Chaplin all rising to fame making Keystone films.
Mack Sennett with Buster Keaton on set.
Mack Sennett Studios.
Mack Swain photographed by Albert Witzel.
Ford Sterling with Marvel Rea and Alice Maison.
Portrait of Mable Normand in a trading card.
Ad for “The Hayseed” with Arbuckle holding his dog Luke.
Photo of Harry Langdon in 1923.
Chaplin satirising Adolf Hitler in “The Great Dictator”.
Chaplin went on to graduate from Keystone’s simple knockabout fare and become the pre-eminent comedy star of the era, eventually commanding a weekly salary in 1915 of US $1250. Crucial to Chaplin’s success was the control that his fame allowed him to exert over his material. As such he increasingly moved away from the broad brushstrokes and overtly slapstick comedies of Keystone and refined his comic alter ego, a down-at-heel but kind-hearted tramp with a bowler hat, walking cane and ill-fitting clothes. Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, was one of the top-grossing films of the silent era and like many of his films, such as The Kid, it explored themes that were close to his heart-not least the effects of poverty, something that resonated with Chaplin’s impoverished background. The film is best known, however, for the ‘roll dance where Chaplin’s tramp performs an artful dance with two forks stuck into two bread rolls. This was typical of Chaplin’s comedy, a canny mix of skillful, balletic physical comedy and thoughtful, situation-based gags.
Charlie Chaplin in his iconic outfit as the tramp.
Big Jim and the Lone Prospector in the wobbling cabin, a scene from “The Gold Rush”.
Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in a publicity photo for “The Kid”.
Keaton, a former acrobat and vaudeville child performer, differed from Chaplin in that his comedy tended to derive from the contrast between his perpetually deadpan face and the absurdly athletic acts his characters had to perform to avoid injury. With Keaton, physical comedy was almost poetic in the thoughtful and skillful performance of increasingly elaborate set pieces that were as dangerous as they were spectacular.
Keaton in costume with his signature pork pie hat.
The coming of sound radically changed the careers of many silent comedy performers. Chaplin resisted films with dialogue until as late as 1940 and The Great Dictator, preferring instead to use sound effects in films such as Modern Times. Keaton found it hard to adjust to dialogue-based comedy and performers such as Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon lost much of their comic Verve and appeal. W.C Fields, who had featured witty repartee as part of his stage career, was able to move from silent hits to a successful career in talkies. Similarly, Laurel and Hardy began working at the end of the silent period, and adapted to the changing medium and initiated the next generation of comic geniuses.
Soldiers Demonstration in Petrograd, Russia , 1917.
As the decades passed, the name of Sergei Eisenstein, the most famous and influential of all Russian directors, falls down the critics’ lists of all-time great directors, it is increasingly tempting to revise, downplay or forget part he and his fellow Russian filmmakers and theorists have played in the development of cinema. Yet the impact of the films and ideas they produced during the 1920s, the high point of the silent movie era and the most innovative decade in Russia’s cinematic history to date, was immense. It has been said that their influence was as often cautionary as it was exemplary. The filmmakers, and the films they made, were a product of the conditions prevailing in immediately post-revolutionary Russia. Those conditions-famine; war, both external and civil: political, social and economic upheaval and institutional instability balanced by the dutiful optimism required in the building of a new socialist state-provided an overwhelming necessity that bred a equal level of invention, which flourished it was snuffed out by the iron fist of Joseph Stalin when he came to power.
Portrait picture of Sergei Eisenstein.
Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible” was a direct dig at Joseph Stalin’s Russia.
That invention applied to all elements of film making, in theory and in practice: acting technique and cinematography, costume, art and production design, as well as the two most celebrated advances made by Soviet cinema in documentary film making and in the art of montage (the effects brought by the juxtaposition of images). The innovation, daring and accomplishment of Soviet films released from 1924 to 1930, including such masterpieces as Mat by Vsevolod Pudovkin. Sergei Eisenstein’s Oktyabr, Chelovek S kino-apparatom by Dziga Vertov and Zemlya by Alexander Dovzhenko were the results of a lengthy and arduous apprenticeship.
The film industry the Bolsheviks inherited was in disarray. Many of the pre-October 1917 generations of producers, filmmakers, and actors had fled Russia. The early years of the Soviet era saw the domestic exhibition circuit in disrepair, film distributors, and production companies in limbo in expectation of nationalization, and film stock virtually non-existent until German imports were agreed in 1922. The foreign film imports that had dominated the market before 1917 dried up and the production of domestic movies stalled It was in these conditions that a young avant-garde generation of filmmakers was given opportunity, freedom, and power at unprecedented levels. Many learned their craft making agitki propaganda films, from a combination of old film stock, newsreel, and newly shot documentary footage, to be screened on film trains sent to remote locations around the country. Lev Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Vertov, as well as directors Leonid Trauberg and Grigory Kozintsev, all worked on these agitational films and this experience of making films aimed at largely illiterate audiences with available resources for instructional and ideological purposes had a profound and formative effect on their later radical stylistic intellectual and aesthetic approach to cinema.
Soviet Agit-Train.
That approach was revolutionary in a number of ways. One was the extent to which, and speed with which they were able to absorb, adapt and incorporate some of the frenzied excitement, radical ideas, trends, practices, and techniques of the established arts. Simultaneous revolutions occurred in art, design, poetry, literature, and theatre. The dynamic geometrics of Constructivist art, the work of theatre directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and Constantin Stanislavsky, and Futurist writer and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky were powerfully influential. The acrobatics, Grand Guignol episodes, shock effects, narrative fragmentation, choreographed movement and use of symbol and characteristic faces Eisenstein deploys in Stachka can be traced to his experience working and directing for Meyerhold, whose theory of biomechanics’ stressed physical expression rather than the psychological motivation favored by Stanislavsky.
A Still from Sergei Eisenstein’s “Stachka’.
In 1919 Kuleshov, the anti-Naturalist, anti-Stanislavsky father of Russian cinema.co-founded the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography film school in Moscow. The lack of film stock contributed to his early practice of shooting film-less’ movies and encouraging his students to re-edit cutups copies of D. W. Griffith movies. One of the first films Kuleshov’s workshop produced was his witty parody Neobychainye priklyucheniya mistera Vesta v strane bolshevikov relating the madcap adventures of an American in Soviet Moscow. Kuleshov’s most outstanding student was Pudovkin, a skilled user of montage in his films. Kuleshov’s experiments in the assemblage and serial editing of film stock began a debate on the theory and practice of montage that became central to Russian cinema of the 1920s. Kuleshov’s ideas were taken up by others, notably by Eisenstein, who went on to analyse them into their various components-metric, rhythmic, tonal and intellectual-in a debate that was eventually deemed deviationist and dangerously ‘formalist’ by the state film apparatus.
Theatrical poster for ‘Neobychainye priklyucheniya mistera Vesta v strane bolshevikov’.
The other central revolutionary element was the development of the documentary film. Vertov worked on Russia’s first newsreel series, Kino-nedelya, and became an avid and vocal advocate of the ‘non-acted’ film, the superior educational role and more perfect presentation of reality provided by a documentary film. With his wife, Elizaveta Svilova, and his Kinoks group he created his own newsreel series, Kino-Pravda. Vertov’s masterwork Chelovek S kino-apparatom is the culmination of his kinetic wizardry and the bravura expression of his innovative montage techniques and camera movement. The use of hand-held and mobile cameras necessitated by the documentary work of Vertov and his collaborators influenced the development of tracking shots used by the new generation of filmmakers, most famously in the shot introducing the fall of the baby’s pram down the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potemkin.
A baby in a carriage falling down the “Odessa Steps”.
Whether the absence of stars from the revolutionary period films was a necessity-most were in exile, new film stars were hard to establish-or intellectual and aesthetic preference is debatable. Eisenstein adopted a representational approach, elaborating the theory of typage, abstain from the use of trained actors in favour of naturschik ‘models’ who could convey to an audience character, role or class. The director chose to cast the inexpressive worker Vasili Nikandrov to impersonate Vladimir Lenin in Oktyabr purely for his facial resemblance, and the masses themselves to play the collective hero Nevertheless, other directors came to rely far more on the elements of script and performance. Pudovkin’s debut Mat highlights Vera Baranovskaya expressive depiction of the mother, a titular heroine spurred into revolutionary action by personal tragedy and loss. Alumni of the experimental theatre group at the Leningrad FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor), such as Trauberg and Kozintsev, traced the path of individual experience and destiny within the popular dramatic forms of satirical comedy, romantic adventure and melodrama in films such as Chyortovo koleso, Shinel and the eccentric, shop girl’s view of the Paris Commune in 1871 shot by Andrei Moskvin, Novyy Vavilon, for which composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his first film score. The Ukrainian director Dovzhenko fascination with the relationship between man and his natural environment led him. in films such as Arsenal and Zemlya, to adopt a more leisurely, painterly and poetic approach to cinema augmenting his tales of class struggle with elements of ritual, myth and folklore.
A still from “Chyortovo koleso” starring Pyotr Sobolevsky and Lyudmila Semyonova.
A stamp depicting “Shinel”, from the souvenir sheet of Russia devoted to the 200th birth anniversary of Nikolai Gogol.
Conceptual poster for Alexander Dovzhenko’s film “Arsenal” by the Stenberg brothers.
Theatrical poster of the film “Novy Vavilon”.
Many of the films cited have proved enduring classics but few were popular with ordinary people. They preferred less didactic entertainments in the form of stirring adventure stories, such as Tsiteli eshmakunebi by Georgian-Greek director Ivan Perestiani, science fiction melodramas, such as the popular Constructivist-designed extravaganza Aelita by Yakov Protazanov, and romantic satirical comedies, including Dom na Trubnoy by Kuleshov experimental workshop member Boris Barnet. This film seditiously uses a lively tale of mistaken identity involving a newly arrived Moscow housemaid to mock the absurdities of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which allowed limited free enterprise to boost the Soviet economy.
A scene from “Tsiteli eshmakunebi”.Yuliya Solntseva as Aelita, Queen of Mars.Theatrical poster for “Dom na Trubnoy”.
As the decade progressed, such explicitly or covertly critical visions of life in the USSR became harder, or more dangerous, to produce. The productive debates and expressions of artistic difference between filmmakers were replaced by assertive ideological quarrels and restrictive production covenants between those filmmakers and their political masters. The apparatchiks of the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment, run since 1917 by Anatoli Lunacharsky, focused their attention on coercing the film industry into adapting to the demands of ‘socialist construction’, enforcing ideological conformity and eradicating inaccessible formalist experimentation. The Strictures grew tighter as Stalin consolidated his power: Lunacharsky was replaced in 1930 by the hard-line Boris Shumyatsky, purges in the industry began, and the reign of comparative freedom and experimentation enjoyed by the revolutionary generation of filmmakers came to a close.
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