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.
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.
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.
திரை படம் 