Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
NOTES ON SOME IMPORTANT TERMS FOR FILM STUDIES
Gopa B. Caesar:
Film History: Silent Period (1895–1929)
The earliest American films, which appeared around 1895, were primarily a working-class pastime. Because they told stories without words, they appealed to the large, mostly illiterate immigrant population in the United States. After 1900, film became a more middle-class phenomenon, as filmmakers exploited film’s storytelling potential by adapting bourgeois novels (which incorporated middle-class values) for the screen.
Until 1914, the major national film industries resided in Italy, France, and the United States. However, World War I devastated the Italian and French film industries, allowing American producers to gain the upper hand on the global market. The major American production companies pooled their film technology patents and used their patent leverage to impose block booking on exhibitors (movie theater owners), which forced exhibitors to buy lower-quality product along with high-quality product.
Exhibitors fought back, vertically integrating by buying small production companies, and eventually managed to beat out the major producers because they were quicker to adopt feature-length films, which proved more commercially successful than the earlier shorts. From 1907–1913, many production companies moved from New York City to Los Angeles to take advantage of the warm weather that allowed for year-round outdoor production, giving birth to the Hollywood film industry. The costs associated with vertical integration forced Hollywood studios to seek investment from Wall Street financiers. This development, along with the industrial modes of production pioneered by Thomas Ince and the bourgeois storytelling conventions introduced by Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith, turned Hollywood into a profit-driven enterprise and its films into commercial commodities.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Major Movements
German Expressionism: Influenced by the art movements of expressionism and constructivism, German filmmakers working for the Berlin-based mega-studio Ufa created a series of important films from 1919–1933, until Hitler came to power. These films sought to express the individual and collective subjectivities, desires, and fantasies of their characters through chiaroscuro lighting; irregular, perspectival set design and camera angles; bold costumes and make-up; and melodramatic gestures and movement. Films of the period featured characters with regressive personalities, motivated to rebel against authority and tradition yet alienated by the chaotic social world of sensual excess and deception that surrounds them. The films’ mise-en-scène, though psychologically expressive, often threatens to reduce the characters into props, their actions into impersonal patterns, and their concerns into romantic abstractions. Key films include Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
Gopa B. Caesar:
Major Movements (CONT.)
Soviet montage: Soviet filmmakers saw editing as the foundation of film art and therefore used the shot, not the scene, as the primary unit of film language and meaning. Influenced by D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), the Lev Kuleshov Workshops, and the futurist and formalist avant-gardes, Soviet filmmakers used dialectical montage to create dynamic juxtapositions aimed at eliciting specific intellectual and emotional responses. Their films sought to portray both the inhumanity of czarist rule and the revolutionary potential, daily labors, and communal bonds of the Soviet people. Key films include Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927), and Dziga Vertov’s A Man With a Movie Camera (1929).
Gopa B. Caesar:
Major Movements (CONT.)
French avant-garde: Influenced by Dadaism, surrealism, and poetic naturalism, French experimental filmmakers made a series of innovative films that explored the medium as a purely visual form, constructed surrealist non-narrative dreamscapes, and used symbolism to externalize the psychology of their characters. Key films include Abel Gance’s La Roue (1922), Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet (1922), Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mécanique (1924), René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924), and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929).
Gopa B. Caesar:
Major Directors and Producers
Lumière, Auguste and Louis: In 1895, the Lumière brothers invented a machine, the Cinématographe, that could shoot, print, and project moving pictures. It was superior to Thomas Edison’s Kinetograph (1891) because it was portable, allowing for easy transportation and outdoor use. On December 28, 1895, a date widely considered the birthday of cinema, the Lumières held a public screening of five of their first films, including Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and The Arrival of a Train at the Station. As the titles suggest, the Lumière films were primarily nonfiction recordings of everyday occurrences, although some also included staged comedic and dramatic elements. The Lumières sent camera crews abroad to shoot and exhibit films, inspiring the birth of film industries around the world and garnering them international fame. The Cinématographe used 35-millimeter film and had a projection speed of 16 frames per second—technical specifications that would become industry standards in the silent period.
Méliès, Georges: While the Lumière brothers demonstrated cinema’s documentary function, Méliès is considered the first to explore the medium’s potential for fictional storytelling. In films such as A Trip to the Moon (1902), Méliès created whimsical adventure stories that were shot on elaborate stage sets and that became popular for their sight gags and otherworldly imagery. Méliès was a pioneer in the use of optical effects, editing, mise-en-scène, and lighting design. His inventive and fantastical films revealed the medium’s ability to convey artistic creativity and imagination.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version