Cinema, Early Development of

V

The Motion Picture Patents Company

Almost since the beginning of cinema there had been litigation between the American companies over the basic patents for camera and projector mechanisms, and this was finally resolved in the formation in 1908 of a trust called the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), which was intended to control totally the now immensely profitable film business. The models for this were the oil, steel, and railway trusts set up at the end of the 19th century in the United States. However, the members of the MPPC were unable to supply sufficient films to fulfil the demand, and new independent production and distribution companies were set up that had about half of the film business by 1912. At this point the American government took legal action against the MPPC, which had really only succeeded in its aims for two years.

VI

Film Art

At the beginning of the nickelodeon period various authors began to write about the cinema as a new art form, rather than as an interesting technical novelty. In France, in 1908, a new company called Film d’Art began production with L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (The Assassination of the Duc de Guise), under a programme using artistically recognized writers, musicians, and actors, with a special theory about how films should be acted. This impressed film-makers even in the United States, and eventually led to the creation by the film industry of a special category of films called art films. (This description is still used today for films of higher artistic intent, made on lower budgets for the minority audience that will appreciate them.) In the nickelodeon period, films from Italy as well as France showed an influence from the middlebrow or Salon Art of the time, particularly in set design and staging.

VII

The One-Reel Film

As part of its expansion, the Biograph company engaged an actor and playwright called D. W. Griffith to direct its films. Griffith was the first film-maker to appreciate fully and apply the existing techniques of film construction to dramatic storytelling. In particular, he used and invented acting gesture in a powerful way, and he also got more shots into a given length of film than others, both by moving his actors from space to space, and also by developing the technique of cross-cutting between parallel actions into a powerful motor for screen drama. For a couple of years he directed all Biograph films, a total of 30 minutes of finished film per week. Eventually, some of his actors shared some of the directing load, including Mack Sennett, who took over the comedies at Biograph. The other major American film companies followed behind Griffith with respect to the increase in the number of shots in films, but an increase in camera closeness to the actor developed simultaneously in films from Biograph and Vitagraph. The latter company also made a conscious attempt at greater realism in its films, including the acting, and pushed this rather further than Griffith. However, Griffith was the leader in using changes in closeness of the camera to emphasize the drama at appropriate points, and also in employing changes in the speed of cutting within the film for the same purpose.

In 1907 the Selig company of Chicago moved some of its production to California, and it was gradually followed by most of the others, who appreciated the advantages of the new locations and the long hours of bright sunlight there.

It was in Westerns shot in California in 1912 that some of the final major developments in film construction took place. One of these was the use of reverse-angle shots, that is, shots taken in the opposite direction to the preceding shot. Although this sort of shot had appeared before on rare occasions, it was not used as a standard method. Shooting a continuous scene with reverse-angle shots has a number of advantages, including presenting the actor’s facial expressions more forcefully, enabling smoother continuity as actors move about the set, and drawing the audience of the film more fully into the action.

Another development allied with this was the use of point-of-view (POV) shots, which meant taking a shot within a scene from the position of one of the actors seen in the preceding (or following) shot. Although point-of-view shots, with a black mask around them simulating the view through an optical instrument or a keyhole, had been used when appropriate since the beginning of the century, the idea of showing what a character in a film sees in an ordinary shot without masking had never been standard practice until this time. POV shots may also be reverse-angle shots, and vice versa, but not necessarily so. A number of little-known film-makers developed these new techniques, but it is certain that D. W. Griffith was not responsible, and in fact he never really used POV shots after they were developed by others. The acting in scenes within D. W. Griffith’s films continued to be organized towards the front, following the theatrical manner.

As American film-makers cut their films up into more and more shots, they had to improve the continuity between these shots. The idea of cutting on action was refined, and the use of reverse-angle shots helped as well. Also, as American films were shot closer and closer to the actors, the acting in them became even more naturalistic and less restrained. The final feature of standard silent cinema was the increasing use of inter-titles, which represented what the actors were saying within the film scene. By 1914 these dialogue titles were being cut into the film at the instant the actors spoke the words, and so the effect was essentially the same as a stage play. Using all these devices, American films brought the audience right up and into the action, and by also leaving out the boring sections with their faster cutting, they proved irresistible to audiences worldwide. By the end of 1914, American films took first place at the box office in Europe, and were taking over from the previously dominant French cinema even in France. The onset of World War I only clinched the inevitable world domination of American cinema.

VIII

Film Comedy

The Griffith style of filming was applied to comedy by Mack Sennett, and combined with the French comedy approach to produce something purely American. The comedy effect was intensified by speeding up the action at the climaxes by turning the camera at a slower rate when the shots were filmed (undercranking). In Europe, the most popular comics had been music-hall clowns such as Boireau (André Deed), also known as Cretinetti and Foolshead, but from 1909 comedians who created a developed character in a more naturalistic style had begun to appear, led by Max Linder. Charlie Chaplin followed the approach of Max Linder within a Sennett-type framework.

IX

The Feature Film

The new developments described above were limited to the United States before World War I, but European film-makers led the way towards longer films lasting several reels. The most notable of these were the Italian films dealing with subjects from Greek and Roman antiquity, such as La Caduta di Troia (1910; The Fall of Troy), and Cabiria (1914), both made by Giovanni Pastrone.

In French and Scandinavian cinema there were also long films made on modern subjects, and although the American system of film exhibition discouraged it, film-makers there joined in a year or two later. This only really began in 1913, with films such as the sensational Traffic in Souls, dealing with the entrapment of girls into prostitution in New York.

As films several reels long became common in the United States, scriptwriting became more important, and here the tradition of the well-made play, as refined in the American theatre from European models, was taken over into the cinema. A basic feature of the well-made play was a well-developed causality in the plot, which ideally had two simultaneous tasks for the hero—to overcome a challenge, and to get the girl as well. Also, the script should alternate action, comedy, drama, and romance from scene to scene throughout the screenplay, and indeed even within the individual scenes if possible. These features were well understood by the people that had come from the theatre, such as D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Mary Pickford. One of Griffith’s first attempts at a real feature-length film was The Avenging Conscience (1914), which developed the use of Symbolism in film, and made use of giant close-ups of objects to convey the thoughts and emotions of the characters.

Film-makers in many countries took up these ideas, and the war years produced many films that utilized Symbolism, allegories, and parables. As part of this first explosion of interest in the possibilities of a truly filmic art, other technical devices were developed by American film-makers. One of these was the flashback, in the sense of an episode from the past inserted into the middle of a film when one of the characters remembers it. Around 1914 American film-makers tried out multiple flashbacks and even flashbacks inside flashbacks. Moving the camera about while filming (the tracking shot) also became popular for a few years from 1914. Although first developed in the United States, the tracking shot was particularly associated with the Italian epic Cabiria.

After his The Birth of a Nation proved an immense commercial success in 1915, Griffith used the profits to construct a grandiose four-hour film around the subject of Intolerance (1916), with four different stories told simultaneously by cross-cutting between them. There was also cross-cutting between different strands of action within the four stories themselves, so that in the latter part of the film there are long strings of shots that have no immediate connection with one another. This proved too much for the general public, as did other similar films, and after this American cinema retreated to a more straightforward form of story presentation.

During the years from 1915 to 1925 the final polish was put on all the features of standard film construction by the brighter young directors who had come into the industry such as Frank Borzage and Marshall Neilan, and some of the older directors such as DeMille picked up these techniques as well. Others who could not dropped out of the business. By the late 1920s the basic techniques of film construction, as the standard method of telling dramatic stories, were complete, and they came to be used everywhere, right up to the present. This is often referred to as “classical cinema”.