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The Heyday of the Silents, Sound Cinema

& Avant-Garde

Jaakko Seppl

http://www.helsinki.fi/taitu/tet/Jaakko/WorldFilmHistory1.html

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The Heyday of the Silents

In the 20s Wall Street became interested in Hollywood

Hollywood studios were making more money than ever

before (80 million tickets a week in USA in 1928)

The silent cinema reached a peak of splendour

The big budget film with eye catching production

values appeared in the twenties

The boundaries between illusionistic, theatricalandrealwere blurring Realist illusion as the dominant aesthetic

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Two Main Modes

In the silent years most studio era genres emerged

The films of the silent period can be categorised

under two main modes, the comic and the

melodramatic (Nowell-Smith)

A broadly melodramatic approach to both character

and plot prevailed in the twenties in action films and

in those purporting to be more psychological in

intent

Comedy came in two types: the slapstick tradition

and the society comedy

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Lillian Gish (1993-1993)

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Harold Lloyd (1893-1971)

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The Classical Style in the 20s

The classical Hollywood style emerged in the 1910s

In the 1920s the style was polished

The Three-point-lighting (artificial studio lighting)

The Soft focus cinematography(created with filters)

In the late twenties the panchromatic film stock

replaced the orthochromatic film stock

The star system (the star as a commodity) To what extent Hollywood movies influenced the style

of European cinemas?

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The Three-Point-Lighting System

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The MPPDA

The early 1920s saw a series of Hollywood scandals

Hollywood films promote decadence -arguments

There was an increasing pressure for a national film

censorship law

In 1922 studios formed a trade organisation The

Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America

Will Hays (the head of MPPDA) guided studios to

produce inoffensive entertainment

Self censorship instead of national censorship

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Will Harrison Hays (1879-1954)

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Film America and Film Europe

Hollywood dominated the world film market

Buying European filmmaking talents ensured that no

national cinema could not compete with Hollywood

Hollywood (with 15000 American film theatres) wastoo great for any one country to compete with

In 1924 European film industries began to cooperate

and to distribute each others films

Continental films instead of national films

Synchronised sound, depression and new political

attitudes ended the pan European movement

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The Introduction of Sound

Thomas Edison attempted to synchronise the sound

and the image already in the 1890s

Hollywood was doing good business in the 1920s

Why invest in the new uncertain technology?

Small studios Warner Bros. and Fox Film saw the sound

film as an opportunity to make good money

Two competing sound systems: The Vitaphone (sound-

on-disc) and The Movietone (sound-on-film)

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

The Jazz Singerpremiered 6 October 1927

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Sound-On-Disc

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Sound-On-Film

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The End of the Silent Era

Audiences chose inferior sound films over high quality

silent films (initially the sound was an attraction)

Silent films were mocked and ridiculed

Many stars lost their careers because of their accentsand others came to be seen as relics of the bygone era

Some made a successful transition to sound

The early sound technology was inflexible and film

aesthetics took several steps back

Slapstick comedy died, musicals emerged, scriptwriters

assumed a new importance

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Anmic Cinma (Duchamp, 1926)

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Avant-garde

Avant-garde is an aesthetically and politically

motivated attack on traditional art and its values

This is truly an independent cinema

Remains marginal to the commercial cinema

First avant-garde films were made in the 1910s but this

cinema really began to flourish in the 1920s

Avant-gardes of the 1920s: abstract animation, dada-related cinema, surrealism, cinma pur, lyrical

documentaries and experimental narrative