American Film History

Selected Readings, Origins to 1960

Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, Art Simon, Cynthia Lucia, Art Simon, Roy Grundmann

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118475164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This authoritative collection of introductory and specialized readings explores the rich and innovative history of this period in American cinema. Spanning an essential range of subjects from the early 1900s Nickelodeon to the decline of the studio system in the 1960s, it combines a broad historical context with careful readings of individual films.

• Charts the rise of film in early twentieth-century America from its origins to 1960, exploring mainstream trends and developments, along with topics often relegated to the margins of standard film histories
• Covers diverse issues ranging from silent film and its iconic figures such as Charlie Chaplin, to the coming of sound and the rise of film genres, studio moguls, and, later, the Production Code and Cold War Blacklist
• Designed with both students and scholars in mind: each section opens with an historical overview and includes chapters that provide close, careful readings of individual films clustered around specific topics
• Accessibly structured by historical period, offering valuable cultural, social, and political contexts
• Contains careful, close analysis of key filmmakers and films from the era including D.W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Erich von Stroheim, Cecil B. DeMille, Don Juan, The Jazz Singer, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Scarface, Red Dust, Glorifying the American Girl, Meet Me in St. Louis, Citizen Kane, Bambi, Frank Capra's Why We Fight series, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Rebel Without a Cause, Force of Evil, and selected American avant-garde and underground films, among many others.
• Additional online resources such as sample syllabi, which include suggested readings and filmographies for both general specialized courses, will be available online.
• May be used alongside American Film History: Selected Readings, 1960 to the Present, to provide an authoritative study of American cinema through the new millennium

Part I
Origins to 1928

1
Setting the Stage
American Film History, Origins to 1928

The origin of almost every important cultural form is a result of converging histories and rests at the intersection of intellectual, technological, and sociological changes. In the case of the American cinema, these origins are located toward the end of the nineteenth century and pivot around a series of developments in the economic, scientific, and artistic history of the nation: the tremendous growth of cities and the arrival of millions of immigrants between 1880 and 1920; the consolidation of business and manufacturing practices that maximized production and created a new means by which to advertise goods and services; the continuation, and in some cases culmination, of experiments devoted to combining photography and motion, most notably those of French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey and American photographer Eadweard Muybridge; and the emerging power of the United States and its place within the world economy.

This period is characterized by the remarkable penetration of cinema into the life of a nation. Between 1896 and 1928, the movies were the primary force behind a unifying transformation in the United States, turning people separated by region and class, educational and ethnic background, into a national audience that, by the late 1920s, consumed the same spectacles on the East Coast as the West, and in theaters in which every seat sold for one ticket price. To be sure, the cinema did not erase divisions of race and gender, and its democratizing impulse did not redraw the class boundaries in America. But one of the most remarkable aspects to the story of early American cinema is how it emerged at a moment when the nation could have drifted toward greater fragmentation, when the influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe could have created a disunited states, and how the cinema, and later radio as well, countered such forces. Indeed, it is perhaps the supreme irony of the movie industry that members of this very same immigrant population would be the ones to build and steer the industry through the first decades of the twentieth century and beyond. In the process, they, and the artists they employed, would produce a unifying set of myths that incorporated and rivaled the historical myths of the nation. Accompanied by its own icons and symbols, from movie stars to corporate logos of roaring lions and snow-capped mountains, and with its own version of holidays in the form of national premieres and award ceremonies, the movie industry created a visual language that transformed citizens into moviegoers. This language, rather quickly internalized by audiences, formed the scaffolding on which a genre-based mass medium developed. The consistent means by which time and space were organized on-screen was accompanied by a consistent array of settings and stories: legends of the Old West, urban crime, family melodramas, slapstick comedy, and, later, tales of horror and love stories set to song and dance.

This is not to suggest that in its early years all movies were the same or their tendencies conservative – far from it. While the movies functioned as a powerful tool of assimilation, they also presented a serious challenge to the prevailing values of the nineteenth century and the white Protestantism that was its anchor. The emerging cinema helped create and represent a new American cosmopolitan society, represented the working class and its struggles, contested nineteenth-century sexual mores, and helped dislodge the cultural officials of an earlier era. One need only think of the genius of Mack Sennett and his slapstick rendering of law enforcement to see the medium's potential for undermining authority. The nickelodeon opened its doors to women and offered business opportunities to new citizens. The larger movie houses to follow, and the content of their projections, as Richard Butsch argues in the hardcover/online edition, would be shaped by, but also contribute considerably to, the reshaping of the American middle class. And yet the history of the film industry over its initial 30 years is also remarkable for the stability it achieved, for its successful instituting of a shared set of conventions with respect to on-screen content and visual style, as well as production and exhibition methods. In this sense the movies reflected many of the wider patterns of American capitalism: modest experimentation so as to differentiate product, within a system of stability that maintained levels of output and consumer expectations while seeking to maximize profits.

The Nickelodeon Era

This period, beginning with film's rapid journey from Kinetoscope parlor to vaudeville house to nickelodeon, as outlined by Richard Abel in the hardcover/online edition, and ending with the changeover to talkies, is characterized by several overarching factors. The first has to do with developments in the machines of moving picture photography and projection. The years of intense experimentation with the production of moving images cover the last three decades of the nineteenth century and make up their own complex history. The name that for many years was most attached to the “invention” of the movies was Thomas Edison. But as early as the 1960s, historians began debunking the various myths around Edison's claim to be the father of the movies, setting the record straight as to how the Wizard of Menlo Park placed his name and his patent on devices and ideas, some produced under his employ, others purchased from beyond it, but all of which culminated in the most widely marketed moving picture machines. Specifically, credit has since been given to W. K. L. Dickson, who, working for Edison, developed the Kinetograph, a camera that drew film through the device at a stop-and-go speed appropriate for exposure using small perforations cut along its edges. Historians have noted that Edison's original intention was to use the movies to accompany his phonograph. Edison's first machine for watching movies was a stand-alone peep box, the Kinetoscope, which ran a 50-foot loop of film, and therefore first defined spectatorship as a solitary activity. Dickson's Kinetograph stood in stark contrast to the Cinématographe, the much lighter camera (that also functioned as a printer and projector) developed in France by the Lumière Brothers, and which may have convinced Edison that the future of the medium rested in projection. Indeed, it would be just two years between the appearance of the first Kinetoscope parlors in New York in April 1894 and the exhibition, in April 1896, of Edison's Vitascope movie projector, presumably a response to the Lumières' 1895 projection of movies in New York City. The Vitascope benefited from Edison's acquisition of a projection machine developed by C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat and from the incorporation of what came to be known as the Latham Loop – developed by Woodville Latham and his sons – a technique whereby the film is pushed into a short arc before descending down past the projection bulb. The loop, which also arcs the film after projection on its way to the take-up reel, stabilizes the drag on the filmstrip to prevent it from breaking. In short, any account of the invention of the movies in America must be framed as a collaboration among individuals, some working together, some working far apart, a synthesis of ideas and experiments – with the recognition that stories about origins are often revised to fit the exigencies of history writing and of the marketplace.

The second overarching development has to do with the films themselves. In just one generation, the movies went from short actualities or simple stories, often screened as multifilm programs, to feature-length films running, in some cases, close to two hours. In the process, the film frame and the space within it became consolidated around the human figure, rather than around more abstract pursuits, and the properties of mise-en-scène (including set and costume design, lighting, and movement and behavior of characters), camerawork, and editing were integrated into the telling of legible and coherent narratives. Pioneer filmmakers such as Edwin S. Porter came to understand that the “basic signifying unit of film,” to use David Cook's phrase, “the basic unit of cinematic meaning,” was not the dramatic scene but rather the shot. In other words, a given scene could be presented across an unlimited number of shots (Cook 1996, 25). Charles Musser, in the hardcover/online edition, provides a detailed analysis of Porter's narrative innovations in such groundbreaking films as The Execution of Czolgosz (1901), Jack and the Beanstalk (1902), The Great Train Robbery, and The Life of an American Fireman (both 1903). Ordering of shots – to create the illusion of continuous action, to alternate the visual perspective on an action, or to create clear temporal markers for events unfolding on-screen – thus became the defining factor in telling a story on film. This essential concept of the shot could then be shaped by cinematographic elements such as lighting, camera angle, temporal duration, and the organization of the space within the frame. Filmmakers like D. W. Griffith, most notably, came to understand the relationship between the scale of a given shot – long, medium, or close-up – and access to the psychology of their fictional characters and thus the chains of identification between spectator and narrative action, as Charlie Keil points out in this volume. This simple insight, that greater visual intimacy was linked to understanding the emotions and motivations of the characters on-screen, opened the door to longer, more complex film narratives, complete with multiple locations and characters drawn over a longer period of time.

Over the course of hundreds of films made between 1908 and 1914, Griffith not only brought his characters closer to the camera, but also refined the use of parallel editing so as to clearly articulate the time frame of specific actions. As Tom Gunning has argued, the language by which Griffith advanced film narration developed within a specific context, responding to pressures from the emerging industry and the society into which his films were being released (1994, 7). Griffith advanced the language of storytelling while maintaining – one might even argue enhancing – the pleasure of the senses so attractive to the earliest moviegoers: “Griffith's films preserved a hedonistic experience, providing thrills that middle-class audiences learned to accept and desire” (Gunning 1994, 90). Griffith's experimentation culminated in his 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation, a film in which his nineteenth-century racial politics collided with his twentieth-century cinematic artistry.

Prompted in part by the importation of European films running well over an hour, the American industry expanded to include the production of multireel features. During the mid-teens, producers, most notably perhaps Universal and the French company Pathé, created an in-between format, the serial, in which a story would be told through weekly installments two to three reels in length. In the late 1910s and into the 1920s, the industry moved increasingly toward feature production. With one reel consisting of approximately a thousand feet of film, a four-reel feature would run (at the silent speed of 16 frames per second) roughly 48 minutes. Four- and five-reel features thus allowed the industry to offer its growing middle-class audience stories with the scope and complexity approximating that which it had come to expect on the legitimate stage.

The development of the American film language was thoroughly enfolded with the methods of mass production created to meet the almost insatiable demand for new films during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Charles Musser has argued that the development of inc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Editors
• Title page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I Origins to 1928
• Part II 1929–1945
• Part III 1945–1960
• Index
• EULA