A colorized lobby card showing a scene from the film ‘The Mark of Zorro’
A whole new movie genre was born with The Mark of Zorro– the swashbuckler. Adventure films, packed with action and romance, these tales of the bold featured pirates, bandits, musketeers, and knights. They also prompted a wealth of comedy spoofs. Zorro was the brainchild of Douglas Fairbanks, who produced and starred in the movie, and the film was the first to be released by United Artists, the studio he co-founded with his wife, actress Mary Pickford, actor-director Charlie Chaplin and director D. W. Griffith. Fairbanks stars as the mild-mannered nobleman Don Diego Vega, who puts on a black mask and cape to become his alter ego. Zorro, and champion the rights of the poor. The film is packed with beautifully choreographed and often amusing fight scenes where Zorro leaps across tables and sips wine while battling his arch-foe, Captain Juan Ramon, and Ramon’s hapless sidekick, Sergeant Pedro Gonzales.
Based on The Curse of Capistrano, a story serialized in a pulp magazine that Fairbanks read and helped adapt for the big screen, the film was a huge risk for the star, who was then known as a romantic lead in contemporary dramas. Such was his concern about audience reaction to his outing as Zorro that he filmed a romantic comedy, The Nut, the same year, but waited to release it until after The Mark of Zorro in case the adventure bombed at the box office. He need not have worried Zorro provided his best box-office receipts to date The public’s appetite was whetted and Fairbanks starred in a string of hits as a swashbuckling hero, including The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad and Don Q, Son of Zorro.
Douglas Fairbanks and Enid Bennet as Robin Hood and Lady Mirian Fitzwalter.
A scene from ‘The Thief of Bagdad’
Front row: Charles Stevens, Marguerite De La Motte, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford (guest), Sidney Franklin. Second row: Boyd Irwin, Nigel De Brulier, Mary MacLaren, Adolphe Menjou, Barbara La Marr, Thomas Holding. Back row: Lon Poff, Eugene Pallette, George Siegmann, Léon Bary, Willis Robards.
Don Q, Son of Zorro film poster.
Other studios were quick to capitalize on the public’s thirst for romance and action. Famous Players-Lasky Corporation The Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino, located events in the Arabian desert and showed that the romantic action hero could have as much, if not more, appeal to women as to men by adding sexual tension into the mix. Such was the film’s success that Valentino reprised his role in a sequel, Son of the Sheik, which proved even more popular.
Rudolph Valentino as Sheik Ahmed and Agnes Ayres as Lady Diana.
Movie poster for the film ‘Son of the Sheik’
Although Fairbanks and Valentino are still remembered today as the classic adventurers of the silent era, they were not alone. Ronald Colman and John Gilbert were also big box-office draw during the 1920s. Colman starred in Paramount Pictures’ Beau Geste, which became the studio’s hit of the year. It tells the story of the three Geste brothers, Michael ‘Beau’, Digby, and John, who join the French Foreign Legion after a scandal engulfs them when a family heirloom is stolen from their home and Beau is fingered as the thief. Feeding the appetite for films with exotic desert locations generated by The Sheik, Beau Geste eclipses its predecessor in terms of visual style and deft camerawork. The opening sequence is a breathtaking shot of a camel train snaking through sand dunes as director Herbert Brenon and cinematographer Roy Hunt establish the tone for a movie full of expertly choreographed crowd scenes and impressive sets. Colman’s nuanced performance, as the most dashing legionnaire among his ragtag comrades, is outstanding in a film that offers mystery, comedy, and sentimental touches as well as exciting action scenes.
Movie poster for the film ‘Beau Geste’
Gilbert came to prominence in war epic The Big Parade, directed by King Vidor, in which the actor showed more than pretty-boy looks. His and Vidor’s fifth collaboration, MGM’s Bardelys the Magnificent was set in France during the reign of Louis XIII. Gilbert plays the Marquis de Bardelys, who woos frosty noblewoman Roxanne de Lavedan in an effort to make her his wife and win a wager. In a story of secret identities, twists, and turns, De Bardelys melts the heart of the icy Roxanne, Gilbert’s charisma and aptitude for realistic on-screen passion make the movie and he became almost as popular a sex symbol as Valentino, former stage actor, Colman went on to have a successful career when the sound came to the screen, winning an Oscar nomination for his first talkie, Bulldog Drummond. Gilbert was less fortunate and his stardom diminished when the talkies arrived. It was claimed his voice was inadequate, although there have been suggestions he fell out of favor with MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer.
Renée Adorée and John Gilbert in ‘the Big Parade’
Arthur Lubin as King Louis XIII from the film ‘Bardelys the Magnificent‘
Lilyan Tashman and Ronald Colman in “Bulldog Drummond’
Cesare illustration by Pooja Sreenivasan from the film ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’.
Early on in the evolution of cinema, certain pioneers realized how perfectly suited the medium was to presenting the uncanny, ghastly, fantastic, and supernatural. French filmmaker Georges Méliès was the first to explore this territory, latching on to the possibilities of slow- motion, speeded-up motion, double exposure, superimposition, stop-action dissolves and all the other cunning tricks that the moving camera could play on delighted, bemused or terrified audiences. As early as 1896, while Louis Lumière sober prose to Méliès’s mischievous poetry-was showing the exciting spectacle of Neuville-sur-Saône: Débarquement du congrès des photographes à Lyon. Méliès was luring his patrons with Le manoir du diable. It is significant that while the Lumière brothers started out as industrial chemists, Méliès was a stage conjuror by profession. Imaginative though they were, however, there was always something of the pantomime about Méliès’s films, and it is hard to imagine that many people were ever seriously scared or disturbed by them.
During the second decade of the 20th century, most of the classic figures of fantasy made their screen debut: Frankenstein in 1910, in a 16-minute version directed by J. Searle Dawley and produced by Thomas Edison: The Werewolf in 1913, directed by Henry McRae; and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1914 as Ein seltsamer Fall, directed by Max Mack. Vampires, however, had to wait until the next decade and Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, directed by F. W. Murnau. Der Golem, directed by Henrik Galeen, offered a variant on the Frankenstein story, based on the legend of a giant clay figure brought to life in 1580 to save the Jews of Prague from a pogrom. The makers of this version were obliged to update the story to the 20th century-to the dissatisfaction of Paul Wegener, who co-scripted it and played the title role. In 1920 he remade Der Golem, this time as director, returning the story to its 15th-century origins to far more potent effect. The monstrous clay giant (again played by Wegener) has a lumbering pathos that anticipates Boris Karloff’s Monster in the Frankenstein films directed by James Whale in the 1930s, while designer Hans Poelzig and cinematographer Karl Freund (two of the period’s finest technicians) created a shadowy, claustrophobic vision of old Prague.
The monster from the cover of the Edison Kinetogram.
An iconic scene of the shadow of Count Orlok climbing up a staircase from the film Noseferatu.
Poster of film The Werewolf.
Paul Wegener as Golem and Lyda Salmonova as Jessica, in Der Golem.
Witchcraft was another subject that fuelled the emerging creativity of fantasy cinema. Danish director Benjamin Christensen decamped to Hollywood, but not before making his masterpiece. Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, with its surreal mix of documentary and richly dramatized sequences, often infused with the spirit of Hieronymus Bosch or Francisco de Goya, mounted an impassioned attack on religious bigotry but found room for mocking humor-especially with the director himself popping up as Satan performing stark naked. Most of Christensen’s Hollywood films are lost, but Seven Footprints to Satan is one of the better-haunted house spoofs.
Director Benjamin Christensen as Satan.The full cast of ‘Seven Footprints to Satan’.
Madmen and especially mad scientists often figured in early fantasy films -and continue to do so. Abel Gance came up with La folie du docteur Tube, about a scientist who discovers how to change the appearance of people and objects with the use of distorting lenses. The fantasy tales of Edgar Allan Poe were a popular resource for adaptation, one of the earliest being Le système du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume. directed by Maurice Tourneur, taken from Poe’s The System ofDr. Tarr and Professor Fether in which a visitor to a lunatic asylum has trouble distinguishing between guards and inmates. The asylum later reappeared as a setting in Kurutta ippeiji, an astonishing avant-garde drama by Japanese director Kinugasa Teinosuke about an ex-sailor who works as a janitor in an asylum to be near his insane wife. Spurning intertitles and challenging the viewer with jump-cut images that predate Jean-Luc Godard by more than thirty years, Kinugasa film deploys Expressionist distortions to put the Viewer inside the madwoman’s head. Even today it looks startlingly modern.
A scene from the film ‘La folie du docteur Tube’.Poster of the film ‘Le système du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume’.Eiko Minami in’ Kurutta ippeiji’.
Many of the early scripts by Fritz Lang, such as Die Pestin Florenz which was another Poe adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death– showed an obsession with death. Lang had seen active wartime service in the Austrian army and sustained serious wounds. In Hilde Warren und der Tod, directed by Joe May, Lang himself took the role of Death, although his acting was found unimpressive. For Der Totentanz and Lilith und Ly, two more death-haunted fantasies, he stuck to scripting his directorial career was getting underway, and he was slated to direct Das Cabinet des, Dr. Caligari. In the event, the assignment went to Robert Wiene, but not before Lang had suggested the film’s cruel final twist. With Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, the cinema of the supernatural definitively took off-especially in post-war Germany The film’s skewed, expressionistic sets, rejecting all pretense at realism the fractured narrative, the hyper-stylized acting and the sense of paranoid uncertainty all expressed the mood of a defeated, traumatized nation, unsure of its identity, seeing enemies within and without. The painted shadows of this movie and its successors during the silent period seemed to prefigure Siegfried Kracauer and other critics have pointed out-the shadows that would deepen over the collective German psyche in the coming years.
Poster for the 1919 German film ‘Die Pest in Florenz’.
The designers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari chose a fantastic, graphic visual style instead of a naturalistic one. This included twisted city scenes that were painted directly onto canvases.
A scene with Hilde Warren & Death from the film ‘Hilde Warren und der Tod‘.
Poster for the film ‘Der Totentanz’.
Not surprising then if Death, either in the form of the Grim Reaper himself or as various of his demonic avatars, dominated German cinema during its most creative period. Released the same year as Nosferatu : eine Symphonie des Grauens, Lang’s Der müde Tod has Death offer to a young woman, whose bridegroom he has taken three chances of rescuing him. But the stories he shows her-set in Caliphate Baghdad, Renaissance Venice and fairy-tale China-prove only the impossibility of rescuing a doomed life, and at last the bride accepts death so as to be reunited with her lover. The triple story in a framework’ format was copied by Paul Leni for Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, where the stories of three of the effigies are told-Harun al-Raschid (Emil Jannings), Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt) and Jack the Ripper (Werner Krauss). Krauss and Veidt, two of the key German actors of the period, had starred in Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari, as the doctor and his homicidal somnambulant respectively.
Goldwyn Releasing lobby card from Caligari showing doctors examining Cesare.
Actor Max Schreck in a promotional still for the film.
The original German release poster for the 1924 film ‘Das Wachsfigurenkabinett’.
A scene from ‘Der Mude’.
Jack the Ripper would also feature in Die Büchse der Pandora, directed by G. W. Pabst. one of the two films he made with the luminous Louise Brooks. Before that, however, Pabst directed Geheimnisse einer Seele, one of the earliest attempts to deal with psychoanalysis on screen. A chemistry professor, troubled by dreams of murder, consults an analyst: the near documentary presentation of the case history contrasts with the depiction of the dreams, all fevered sexual in symbolism, whirling multiple exposures, and virtuoso expressionistic set designs The US immigrant Arthur Robison attempted something similar in Schatten, about a psychotically jealous husband who undergoes hypnosis, but the film was far stronger on atmosphere than on plot. Henrik Galeen, who directed the first Golem movie, returned to Prague for Der Student von Prague, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William Wilson‘ in which Conrad Veidt plays a poor student who sells his own mirror image, only to find it doing terrible things in his name. Galeen’s team, designer Hermann Warm (who had worked on Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari) and cinematographer Günther Krampf, conjured up a swirling, hallucinatory world where everything seems about to shift and dissolve.
Theatrical poster for ‘Die Büchse der Pandora‘.
A scene from ‘Geheimnisse einer Seele’.
A scene from ‘Schatten’.
Paul Wegener as the ‘Student von Prag’, movie poster by Zajac, Lithographie.
In the whole rich crop of fantasy films of the German silent period, there is a sense of dark forces taking over, of things out of control and sliding inexorably towards the edge of a fatal abyss-inevitable, again, to relate this to the nightmare that would soon engulf the country. Not that the German cinema had a monopoly on fantasy at this time. Hollywood produced a run of films starring the protean Lon Chaney, who established himself as one of the most powerful performances of the era. In one of his most memorable performances, Chaney played the facially deformed Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera directed by Rupert Julian. Chaney garnered critical acclaim in the part not only for his acting abilities but also for his artistry in applying his own innovative make-up.
Lon Chaney as the Phantom, and Mary Philbin as Christine Daaé.
Although these Hollywood fantasies featured morbid and fantastical elements, they were essentially grotesque tales within realistic settings and lacked the unnerving sense of an entire world slipping out of kilter that was so potent in the German cinema of the period. A rare exception was The Man Who Laughs, directed by Paul Leni with Conrad Veidt in the title role, a piece of perverse Grand Guignol adapted from Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name. Veidt plays Gwynplaine, the son of a disgraced English nobleman who has offended King James II. On the king’s orders, Gwynplaine is disfigured and left with a permanent rictus grin. Gwynplaine’s freakish grin was later to influence the designers of the comic book character the Joker in Batman comics.
Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine, an inspiration for the Joker, the 1940 comic book nemesis of Batman.
The virgins portrayed soulfully by Lillian Gish and playfully by Mary Pickford during the silent era were countered by two comparatively modish manifestations of the sexual woman. In the mid-teens came the vamp, the voracious destroyer of upper-class men, iconically portrayed by Theda Bara in A Fool There Was. In the 1920s the vamp handed over her place to the flapper, a indulgent but far from malign figure embraced most famously by Colleen Moore and Clara Bow, in The ‘It’ girl.
The “Vamp” and the wealthy family man she seduces and ruins.Clara Bow as the ‘It’ girl.
Virgins and vamps were holdovers from a Victorian melodrama, fantasy creations rooted in idealized and demonized notions of femininity. Arriving after World War I, the flapper was one face of the emancipated New Woman who worked, voted, smoked, drank, danced to jazz, and had sex. The other face was the sophisticated wife, played most adventurous by the elaborately costumes Swanson in six Cecil B. DeMille boudoir comedies beginning with Don’t Change Your Husband. The sexy, working girl and the liberated wite morphed into the fast-talking modern women of 1930s screwball comedy Just as the femme fatale of 1940s Film Noir was the product of male anxieties during a time of national upheaval, the vamps sociological construct. Unlike the femme fatale, however, she would not later be redeemed by feminist scholars. She emerged as a cinematic phantom, via Sir Philip Burne Jones painting The Vampire, the poem of that name by his cousin Rudyard Kipling and Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, all from 1897. Kipling’s poem inspired Porter Emerson Browne’s Broadway hit of 1909, A Fool There Was. Browne’s play drew on the Social Darwinist theories of influential sociologist William Graham Sumner, which suggested that the vampiric nature of female sexuality threatened the capitalistic energies of the evolutionary Aryan male Implicating Browne’s play and Frank Powell’s film of 1915. cultural historian Bram Dijkstra has traced how the teachings of Sumner and his contemporaries embracing racism and misogyny, eventually fed the Nazi genocide.
Whether or not Bara considered the social ramifications of her performance, the movie’s success enabled William Fox to found his studio and made her a star. She exploited her vampish traits with an array of kohl-eyed domestic temptresses and exotics, most famously Cleopatra. However, she was not US cinema’s first vamp Alice Hollister had pre-empted her in The Vampire, in which vaudeville dancers Alice Eis and Bert French recreated their notorious Vampire Dance of 1909. As an otherworldly woman who sucks the life force from a lawyer, Bara was the most erotic of fatal women-despite her ponderousness until 1926 when Greta Garbo starred in The Temptress and Flesh and the Devil. Betty Blythe Helen Gardner and Myrna Loy were among those who played variations on the vamp without challenging Bara’s cultural impact Imported from Germany in 1922, Pola Negri brought a darkly passionate presence to her Paramount films but she was more imperious than deadly.
Alice Eis and Bert French in “Vampire Dance” from the motion picture “The Vampire”.Greta Garbo and Antonio Moreno in The Temptress in 1926.Publicity still with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert for Flesh and the Devil.
In 1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald symbolically launched the roaring twenties with his sensational debut novel This Side of Paradise and Olive Thomas, who had originated the ‘baby vamp’ in Upstairs and Down, played a schoolgirl imitating a jazz baby in The Flapper, the first use of that word in the United States. Fitzgerald credited Colleen Moore as the quintessential flapper for her performance in Flaming Youth. Moore became a box-office phenomenon but she was wholesome rather than seductive. That could not be said of Bow in films like It, in which Bow excelled as a department store employee out to snare its owner, and writer Elinor Glyn showed up on screen to explain the meaning of It, her euphemism for sex appeal. Bow had this in abundance she was a whirling of winks, smiles, pouts and wiggles, but she never crossed the line into vulgarity or made desirability threatening.
Clara Bow in 1932.
On another plane was the dazzling, extravagant Louise Brooks. Having played flappers in A Social Celebrity, Love Em and Leave Em and Rolled Stockings, she was summoned to Berlin to star in Die Buchse der Pandora by GW Pabst. Haplessly promiscuous Brooks’s Lulu destroys men not deliberately but because she cannot help it. Her performance carried the flapper into the realm of the love goddess.
Epic movies are known for their big budgets, towering sets, large casts, breadth of vision, and sometimes their special effects. In the early days of cinema, the growing technology limited what directors could produce but as it improved directors gave full rein to their imagination.
The roots of the epic spring from Europe and in particular Italy, where directors looked back at their country’s classical past to make films that were visually extravagant and operatic in scale. Enrico Guazzoni used 5,000 extras in his nine-reel drama Quo Vadis set in early Christian Rome. Giovanni Pastrone filmed Cabiria: visione storica del terzo secolo AC, in multiple locations. It is three hours long, sports a cast of hundreds and features spectacular sets. Pastrone and his Spanish cinematographer Segundo de Chomón were the first to use a dolly-track system, which allows a camera to move. This enabled them to create smooth tracking shots. De Chomón was a great master of optical effects, contributing to Napoléon directed by Abel Gance an epic film that explored camera techniques extensively.
The Temple of Moloch scene.A monochrome photographic portrait of Albert Dieudonné in his late 20s dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte.
Italian sword and Sandal epics were a major influence on Hollywood output and inspired Cecil B. DeMille to make his first version of The Ten commandments a 136-minute spectacle that dramatizes the biblical story of Moses. DeMille deployed his sense of showmanship again in 1927 when he directed the spectacular biblical epic The King of Kings about the life and death of Jesus Christ.
The Last Supper scene featured in The King of Kings.
When World War I broke out in 1914 it disrupted the development of the European film industry but US directors continued to break cinematic barriers.
Poster and advertisement of The Birth of a Nation on the second week of release. It includes preview images from the film.
D. W. Griffith directed a saga about the American Civil War, The Birth of a Nation, which was innovative in its technical and narrative style. Yet the United States was not immune to events in Europe and The Birth of a Nation was intended to show war as abhorrent Directors explored the subject of war further with pacifist films such as the allegorical Civilization by Thomas H. Ince. Ince was a titan of the early film industry, a film director who also defined the roles of film producer and production executive, helped to develop the Hollywood studio system and in 1915 co-founded one of Hollywood’s first major independent production companies, Triangle Motion Picture Company.
Full-page newspaper advertisement promoting the spectacle of Civilization.Movie poster for Civilization.
Ince realized the need for a place to make feature films requiring large sets, props, dressing rooms, and stages. He built the first recognizable studio, Inceville, at a ranch in Los Angeles, and filmed Civilization there. Set in the imaginary kingdom of Wredpryd, the movie follows the fate of a submarine commander who refuses to fire at a civilian ocean liner suspected of carrying ammunition for his country’s enemies, sinks his submarine and finds himself in Purgatory. Ince promoted his movies with newspaper advertisements touting the extravagance of its one million dollar production: Used for Ammunition in One Battle/40,000 People Employed/10,000 Horses in Thrilling Cavalry Charges/40 Aeroplanes in Great Air Battle. The film was a success and its bloody depiction of war so effective that when the United States entered World War I in 1917, it was pulled from distribution.
After the war directors such as Fritz Lang made an impact in Europe. Die Nibelungen: Siegfried and Die Nibelungen Kriemhild’s Rache were based on a 13th-century poem about the Teutonic warrior Siegfried. Lavish productions, with fantastical set designs, choreographed battle scenes, and mythological creatures, these films laid the foundations for the fantasy epic.
A transformation sequence from Die Nibelungen: Siegfried: After Siegfried’s death, Kriemhild has a vision of Siegfried’s last farewell to her.
However, it was a movie with a World War I theme that became the silent era biggest blockbuster: The Big Parade, directed by King Vidor. achieved an unprecedented ninety-six-week run at New York’s Astor Theater. Vidor created an anti-war epic showing the brutality of trench warfare, which strikes an emotional chord because of its effective portrayal of intimacy. The film stars John Gilbert as Jim, a lazy rich kid who is shamed into enlisting, Jim comes of age as he makes friends with fellow soldiers, falls in love with a French girl and faces the reality of losing those he loves. Vidor’s focus on the joking camaraderie between the young soldiers adds to the poignancy of their fate when they fall.
In Italy, early filmmakers were drawn to the mythical and the spectacular. The works of Dante provided a fruitful source of material, the most successful example being L’inferno, which is considered to be the first Italian feature length film. At the same time, the historical genre was developing through a series of spectacular short films, notably La caduta di Troia directed by Giovanni Pastrone and Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii directed by Mario Caserini.
A scene from the film ‘The Great Train Robbery’
In the United States The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter, is recognized as the first US narrative film. Porter’s innovative camera techniques and editing, location shoots, and Western format combined to make an exciting film for audiences of the day. As technology advanced, filmmakers were able to make longer films, sometimes turning to literature for inspiration. In 1907, Canadian director Sidney Olcott made the first film version of Ben Hur for the New York-based Kalem Company. Adapted from Lew Wallace’s novel of 1880, the 15-minute film is hard to follow unless the viewer knows the story, and its famous chariot race-filmed from a fixed point-lacks excitement. However, it was popular enough for Kalem to be sued successfully for copyright infringement, and the outcome provoked the setting of a precedent for future literary adaptations.
An article about ‘Ben Hur’ 1907
Cramming a lengthy narrative from a novel into a short film was problematic and therefore some of the most satisfying films to emerge were those written specifically for the big screen. Le moulin maudit, shot for Pathe Frères by French director Alfred Machin, tells a story of revenge. Filmed on location in Belgium, stencil tinted to provide color and running at almost 6 minutes, the playlet has a self-contained narrative that is easy to follow.
Couverture du premier volume de la série Fantômas par Pierre Souvestre et Marcel Allain, Paris, éditions Fayard, 1911.
Jean Marais as Fantômas in the 1964 film. In addition to the characteristic face mask, the black gloves of Fantômas are visible.
As technology advanced, filmmakers produced movies that grew in length, and mini-serials developed. Among the more successful in this format is Fantômas, a five-part serial based on one of the most popular characters in French crime fiction, played by René Navarre. Directed by Louis Feuillade, each episode lasted about an hour and ended grippingly on a cliffhanger. Fantômas is an amoral, murderous villain who has continued to capture the imagination of filmmakers up to the present day. Another Feuillade serial, Judex, follows the fantastic adventures of a more virtuous and heroic protagonist in what perhaps marks the first appearance of a caped crusader. The prolific French filmmaker also produced the ten-part serial Les vampires, which tells the story of a Parisian crime organization known as ‘Les Vampires‘. The thriller techniques developed by Feuillade were to influence later masters such as Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock.
The opportunity to make longer products, the emergence of the Hollywood studios, and larger budgets encouraged filmmakers to produce literary adaptations such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, directed by Scotsman Stuart Paton and based on Jules Verne’s novel of 1869 and the same author’s The Mysterious Island. Paton joined forces with two fellow British immigrants to the United States, brothers John and George Williamson to create the first film showing underwater sequences. The pioneering special effects, location shoots, and elaborate sets -including a mock-up of the Nautilus submarine-created a film that was truly remarkable for its time. The appetite for spectacle continued to find expression in epic films such as The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, forming what would later become known as the sword-and-sandal genre. Directed by Fred Niblo and an uncredited Charles Brabin, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ proved a troubled and costly production for the newly merged Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. To make the chariot race more exciting, a US $100 prize was put up by the studio for the winner.
The spirit of pioneering director Georges Méliès can be glimpsed in such epic films of the 1920s and later in the special effects work of Ray Harryhausen in the 1950s and 1960s. Film techniques have grown more complex and narrative structures ever more sophisticated, but the basic creative rationale of cinema-to reinvent and reinterpret reality-has remained constant since its earliest days.
Motion pictures both created and fed an appetite for spectacle, offering the possibility of recreating the past, reimagining the present, and visualizing the future. The technology for making movies was invented in 1895, but the first films were often just a few seconds long and depicted simple everyday events or trick effects. Films with a recognizable narrative arrived with the 20th century. The earliest pioneers were not based in Hollywood, which did not then exist as a center of film making, but in Europe. Notable among them were French filmmakers Georges Méliès, Charles Pathé, and Ferdinand Zecca. The latter directed the 1-minute short A la conquête de l’air in which he flew over the Belleville neighborhood of Paris in a bizarre flying machine. The film was produced for Pathé Frères, the film production company founded in 1896 by Charles Pathé and his brother Emile. The brothers were former restaurateurs who, in reference to their culinary origins, used a distinctive cockerel, Le Coq, as their trademark.
Méliès at his studio in Montreuil
A technical difficulty that held back film’s potential as an art form was the inability to create continuity of action across successive shots. Attack on a China Mission Inspired by China’s Boxer Rebellion, it focuses on a group of Christian missionaries under siege by Boxer fighters. It was directed by British film pioneer James Williamson who created one of the most developed narratives of its time. The film boasted a set in an insecure house, a cast of a couple of dozen people and action shots aided by simulated explosions and gunshots.
Screenshot from the film Attack on a China Mission
After attending the first public screening of the Lumière brothers’ films in 1895, the theatre impresario and stage magician Georges Méliès quickly grasped the possibilities for cinema as a vehicle for illusion and fantasy. Méliès’s signature was the magician’s love of trickery, splicing the fantastic with the macabre. The silent fantasy L’homme à la tête en caoutchouc features Méliès as a scientist who attaches a rubber tube to his own detached head and inflates it with a pair of bellows. The experiment is repeated by an assistant, who inflates the head until it explodes. In Le voyage dans la lune the image of the rocket ship landing in the moon’s eye is a typical Méliès juxtaposition of the whimsical and the visceral. Yet for all the dazzling cinematic innovations that Méliès developed and exploited, his films never truly broke free from his theatrical roots The Société Film d’Art was an altogether more high-minded enterprise, formed with the intention of bringing artistic standards to the cinema, particularly in the depiction of history. The first and best-known example was L’assassinat du duc de Guise, directed by Charles Le Bargy and Andre Calmettes, which was based on an incident in the 16th century when Henri III arranged for the assassination of his aristocratic rival. Despite the sensational nature of the subject, the film, with a specially commissioned score by Camille Saint-Saëns and a cast drawn from the Comédie-Française, provided a sober and serious historical pageant.
Film Poster for “L’ASSASSINAT DU DUC DE GUISE” (The Assassination of the Duke de Guise), a movie by “Le Film d’Art”
In India, the pioneering director D. G. Phalke, inspired by Sepi an early film version of the life of Christ, learned the rudiments of film making to make Raja Harishchandra. This elaborate costume drama, based on Hindu mythology, marked the start of the Indian film industry, Drawing on a text from the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, the film tells the story of King Harishchandra, who gives up his kingdom in order to keep his promise to a holy man. Using an all-male non-professional cast and filming in the countryside surrounding Mumbai, Phalke created an elaborate Hindu epic of some 40 minutes. The film was an enormous success when it was first shown at the Coronation Cinema in Mumbai. Unfortunately, only the first two reels survive and modern audiences must guess at the ambitions of the finished film.
Phalke seated on a chair with a small roll of film in his hands.
Horst von Harbou, set photograph from Metropolis, 1927, directed by Fritz Lang, La Cinémathèque française
Besides Hollywood in the 1930s, we could single out Germany and Soviet Russia in the 1920s, France in the 1930s, Britain and the Italy of Neo-Realism in the late 1940s, Japan in the 1950s, France again with the Nouvelle Vague of the 1960s, the films of the Prague Spring in the mid-1960s, Czechoslovakia, Germany again with the New German Cinema of the 1970s, the Hollywood of the ‘storytellers’ such as Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman in the same decade, and the Chinese cinema of the Fifth Generation in the 1980s. More recent decades have seen flowerings of film making talent from Iran, South Korea, Thailand, Latin America, and Romania.
Jean-Luc Goddard with Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina in 1965Roohangiz Saminejad in Lor Girl, was Iran’s first ever sound film to be produced.
At other times and not always coinciding with a specific golden age certain genres and styles enjoy growth, often in response to a national mood. Looking at Hollywood, a social historian could trace the way in which Film Noir that haunted emanation of the American psyche emerged in the shadows of imminent world conflict just as the perky cheekiness of 1930s screwball comedy reached the end of its cycle, and then continued into the paranoid years of the Cold War, overlapping with-and even infecting-the more optimistic all-American genres of the musical and the Western. Likewise, one could link the cycle of J-horror’ films that began with Ringu (The Ring) by Hideo Nakata to the increase in national uncertainty and disillusionment that followed the crisis in the Japanese economy.
A scene from Hideo Nakata’s ‘Ringu’Martin Scorsese on the sets of ‘Mean Streets’ with Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel in 1973.A screenshot from the movie ‘Rome, Open City’.
The second century of cinema seems likely to see revolutionary changes within the art form, and possibly even its metamorphosis into something radically different. Within the last three decades, with the rise and growing sophistication of computer-generated imagery (CGI), cinema has become increasingly technology-driven. This, it could be argued, is unprecedented. The earlier major developments in cinematic technology-sound, color, and widescreen-though far-reaching in their impact, remained subordinate to the film making process. Even when their words could be heard and their actions are seen in Technicolor on huge screens, actors still performed in front of a camera, on a set or on location, just as before. However, computers have revolutionized live-action cinema perhaps more than they have changed animation. After all, the makers of Toy Story and its successors are still painting moving pictures, as were Disney’s artists in Bambi all that has changed are the tools.
Original theatrical release poster.Original theatrical release poster.
In live action films, not only can huge monsters and vast armies be created on-screen, but also actors can appear on complex landscapes despite never having seen them. Even the actors themselves can be fabricated through motion capture-witness Andy Serkis’s performance as Gollum in the same film-and might even become superfluous as the techniques of CGl and motion capture become more sophisticated. Before long, the first wholly convincing computer-generated ‘human’ actor in a live-action film may be seen, and deceased stars could be resurrected to give new performances.
Andy Serkis as Gollum from ‘ The Lord of the Rings’.
Almost from the first, it was recognized that cinema was unique in its immediacy and accessibility. For some, this was a matter for celebration. However, a medium so widely disseminated and influential soon fell under suspicion of vulgarizing, sensationalism, lubricity, political propaganda, encouraging mindless consumerism and corrupting the morals of the youth.
A famous shot from the 1903 film, The Great Train Robbery. Scenes where criminals aimed guns at the camera were considered inappropriate by the New York state censor board in the 1920s, and usually removed.
Such condemnations were sweeping in the extreme. The Chicago Tribune stated that motion pictures are without a redeeming feature to warrant their existence. Moreover, even the then British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald called out Hollywood as a ‘Sinful and abominable rubbish’. From politicians, preachers and teacher came demands for control, for systems of censorship, often resulting in the setting up by the industry of self regulatory bodies. The most famous of these was the Motion Producers and Distributors of America, which drew up a list of “provisions” known as the Hays code. Even so, far from being obstructed by these petty do’s and don’ts’, many filmmakers such as Ernst Lubitsch and Alfred Hitchcock took delight in subtly circumventing them.
This 1932 promotional photo of Joan Blondell was later banned, under the unenforceable Motion Picture Production Code.Some directors found ways to get around the Code guidelines. An example of this was in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 film, Notorious, where he worked around the rule of three-second-kissing by having the two actors break off every three seconds. The whole sequence lasts two and a half minutes.
A more lasting, and in many ways more restrictive, curb on the creativity of filmmakers lay within the structure of the industry itself. In some ways the medium’s very popularity told against it. Once it became evident what potential profits stood to be made from films, the business side of the industry set out to secure a stranglehold over its more experimental or artistic elements. While the three main branches of production, distribution and exhibition remained separate from each other, there was room for maneuvre, however, as the power of studios increased and vertical integration became common, the scope of independence rapidly narrowed.
Clark Gable reading Gone with the wind, a novel by Margaret Mitchell.
It therefore says a lot for the sheer irrepressible vitality of the medium that, both within and outside the studio system, so many exceptional films have been made and, it is worth emphasizing, are still being made today. in cinema, as in so many other activities, the myth off the ‘golden age’ continues to hold sway. A legendary era when classic after classic was produced and overall creative standards were high.
At any time, probably no more than 30% of the world’s annual output of films is worthy of even passing attention, and that may well be an overestimate.
Has any art form caught on so swiftly or so universally as cinema? Although the exact moment of its origin is still debated upon, most accounts agree on the year 1895. The year in which brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere (the gentlemen in the above picture) projected La sortie des usines Lumiere to the members of the Societe d’Encouragement pour l’industrie nationale and then gave private demonstrations of their films to the Photographic Congress at Lyons. Within no time, at the Hotel Scribe in Paris, they mounted their first ever public screening of their films.
Charlie Chaplin, a pivotal figure in early cinema, on a set at Keystone Studios.
Within a mere 20 years of these pioneering ventures, films were being watched by mass audiences across the world. Production was under way in all the major European countries, in the United States, Canada, India, China, Japan, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Australia, and was already supported by a substantial industry in many of those countries. So instantaneous was the appeal of moving pictures that Charlie Chaplin stepped before a movie camera for the first time in January 1914 as a young English vaudeville artist, and by the end of that year had become the most widely recognized person in the world.
Paradoxically, one major factor in cinema’s rapid rise to universality was its principal limitation: Silence. Silent films were easily and cheaply adaptable: slot in a few inter titles and a film could play to any audience. On the other hand the Japanese, as distinctive as ever, employed official readers known as benshi, whose job was to stand and beside the screen and recount the plot to the audience. One can speculate that cinema had been born in full ‘talkie’ mode it might have have taken far longer to achieve worldwide acceptance. As it was, by the time the ‘talkies’ came in, the habit of going to the cinema was too firmly established to be discouraged by language barriers.
A benshi stands alongside the screen as she narrates the plot to the audience.
The prime cinematic genres emerged early, too. Within months of the Lumiere brothers’ screenings, the ex-stage magician Georges Melies was creating fantasy, horror, and science fiction movies. Documentary, of course, existed from the start, as many early filmmakers simply pointed their cameras at the world around them. Comedy swiftly followed, along with costume based drama, romance, thrillers, psychological drama, war movies, ancient epics and even pornography. As usual the United States made westerns as it was their favorable choice, especially after the industry moved to California. Animation soon arrived, its first appearance credited to J. Stuart Blackton with Humorous Phases of funny Faces. By 1910, virtually every genre that we now recognize had been established, although some were in primitive form.
Georges Melies in his studio working on La VoyageDans La Lune.J. Stuart Blackton working on his animated feature Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.
The same can be said for of the main cinematic techniques. It took remarkably little time for filmmakers to discover the manifold tricks that the camera could play. From Close-ups to fades all made their debuts in those initial decades. All that has happened since has been in terms of vastly greater sophistication and technical agility. Youngest and most dynamic of the major arts, cinema has gone from being primitive to post modern in barely a century, still bearing imprints of it origins.
திரை படம் 