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Summary Chapter 1-12, A History of Film
Summary study book A History of Film of Virginia Wright Wexman (Hoofdstukken 1 t/m 12) - ISBN: 9780205625284, Edition: 7e druk, Year of publication: 2010
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Chapter 1 Birth and Childhood of a New ArtThe most important reason motion picture came into being had nothing to do with their
artistic potential. Its tools and materials were invented out of a desire to make visual records
of life and to study the movements of animals, including humans. The first films, made in the
United States in the 1980s bij the motion picture company founded by Thomas Alva Edison,
the great inventor, were of vaudeville and circus acts. In France the Lumière brothers, Louis
and Auguste, took their lighter-weight camera, developed from the kinetoscope peep-show
viewing machine manufactured by Edison from 1894 on, out into the everyday world. The
novelty of captured motion was intriguing enough at first.
It was the Lumière brothers who thought to project the image (onto a sheet) and began paid
public performances of their films in a basement café in Paris in December 1895. In April
1896 the first commercial projection in a theatre took place at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in
New York. The films shown were those made by the Edison Company. As they chose the
actions they would record, film makers soon discovered what painters and still photographers
had already known: that some subjects have more intrinsic interest than others do. Film
historian Tom Gunning has labelled this early fascination with what moving images could
show the cinema of attraction.
As stripped to essentials as these primitive films seem, there were seminal differences
between the programs of the Grand Café in Paris and those at Koster and Bial’s in New York.
These differences suggest the two main and divergent aesthetic impulses that have continued
to today. One tendency, called the formative, was to strive for the “artistic,” to use materials
and models from older arts (Edison). The other tendency, the realistic, as to take pride in the
verisimilitude of photographic reproduction and in its ability to capture and preserve
unadulterated actuality of events and views (Lumière). In Lumière’s work the people,
animals and vehicles frequently moved toward and away from the camera, not just laterally in
relation to it, as in many Edison films that duplicated stage-bound movement. Screens were
filled alternately with Lumière-type actualités and Edison-like stage attractions, and before
the end of the decade both firms were producing both types of films.
It is not possible to establish when the first film to incorporate a story was made or who was
responsible for it. Many of the early films have disappeared, so the “firsts” in film technique
are subject to endless argument. National pride and individual partisanship further affect
writing of film history in this regard. But no one would deny the importance of George
Méliès’s contribution to the development of narrative full-length film. Méliès had a
background in the arts, which led him to think of the motion picture in a different way. In
April 1896 Méliès began showing his movies at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. His brief skits
and slides of life on the street were evidently quite indistinguishable from those of others. But
according to Méliès’s later account, it was during that first year as a film maker that he
discovered quite by accident what would make his contribution most distinctive: the capacity
of the motion picture to move beyond the real into the fantastic. Méliès took deliberate
advantage of this accidental discovery in The Vanishing Lady and The Haunted Castle
(1896), starting an early genre of “trick films”. Although he had many imitators, it was years
later before film makers were able to figure out how some of his remarkable results had been
achieved. In addition to introducing trickery, Méliès also made the most important beginning
steps in screen narrative techniques and helped increase the standard running time from less
than a minute to ten to fifteen minutes. In 1897 he built France’s first permanent film studio
and founded Star Film Company, the first French firm exclusively to making movies. Méliès
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,marvellous contributions and ultimate limitations, in terms of film, are all clearly evident in A
Trip to the Moon. Although he achieved a theatrical sophistication of content and style, he
failed to discover the capabilities of the unique tools of the motion picture, the camera and
cutting shears. One other aspect of Méliès’s importance was that he, with his trick films,
established the basis of what would become the avant-garde tradition. Which he began in
France in the 1920s and has continued today in the experimental/underground/independent
film. It is possible to say, that the three main artistic modes of film were present in embryonic
form almost from the outset: narrative fiction, documentary, and experimental.
Edwin S. Porter, an American who began film work in 1896, was much less well equipped in
artistic background or sensibility than Méliès. By his own admission Porter was more
mechanic than artist. At the time Porter was hired by Edison, in 1900, film makers were first
of all camera operators, valued more for their technical ingenuity in keeping the camera
operating properly than for their creative imagination. Porter appears to e the one to have
made the next crucial step that set film on its main road of advance. In late 1902 and early
1903 Porter made Life of an American Fireman, which raised the possibility of connecting
different parts of a total action, all seeming to be happening at the same time but in various
places. Porter followed Life of an American Fireman with a radically abridged adaptation of a
popular stage melodrama of the day, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Although this production consists
of little more than a series of tableaus played out against patently artificial backdrops, the
intertitles that introduce each scene are the first known in an American film. Porter’s
innovations were anticipated and developed by film makers in other countries whose work is
now beginning to receive more scholarly attention. In the mid-1890s the British inventor R.
W. Paul developed a camera and projection system that was widely used to create and show
films all over the world.
In France, Alice Guy made what was perhaps the first fiction film, The Cabbage Fairy, in
1896. After serving for several years as a head of film production at Gaumont, where she
directed over four hundred one-reelers, Guy emigrated to America, where, with her husband
Herbert Blaché, she founded the Solax film company in 1909. David Wark Griffith’s
introduction to film was in Porter’s Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (1907). In 1908 he directed
his first film, The Adventures of Dollie. In a remarkable short time Griffith mastered what
there was to know about the new medium an progressed beyond his contemporaries.
Perhaps Griffith’s single-most important insights was that the shot rather than the scene
should be the basic unit of film language. It was Griffith more than anyone who came to
understand the separate psychological-aesthetic functions on the long shot, the medium shot,
and the closeup, and who used this awareness consistently. In Griffith’s work, and in that of
his successors, the long shot usually begins a scene, establishing the action and its setting.
Full of information, one could go on and on describing all the things seen in it, it is
emotionally cool. The medium shot rather than the long shot became the standard framing
from which the director departs for special purposes. When the camera is moved closer still,
to a closeup, the visual information becomes quite limited, but the emotional weight becomes
very heavy. Alternation of tempo through editing of detached shots is something that Griffith
came to understand from intuition and experiment, and that Porter understood not at all.
Griffith might extend screen time beyond actual time by means of cross-cutting. He would cut
back and forth from shots of bandits to shots of a posse, building a rhythmic climax, but his
chases seem incredibly more tense, and even faster.
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, The cut is basic within scenes; virtually unnoticed in itself, it is necessary for the variable
ordering and pacing of the action. The dissolve is a more noticeable transition in which one
image is gradually superimposed over, and then replaces, the other.
When one image fades out to darkness and a new image fades in to full exposure, a different
place and lapse in time are usually being signalled also. An iris begins with a black screen
containing only a small circle of the total image. Then as the iris opens up it reveals the whole
action and setting. Griffith also experimented with superimposition and split screen for special
effects. Griffith was one of the leaders in the movement against the short length of films
imposed by the American industry of the day. With few exceptions, the dominant companies
were conservative in their adherence to established practise and their unwillingness to risk the
capital that longer films would have required.
In early days movie makers experimented with a wide array of film forms, including serial
films, which featured continuing story lines played out over many individual episodes, and
series films, which featured a continuing set of characters engaged in various adventures. The
best-known practitioner of these forms was the French director Louis Feuillade, whose
masterful compositions created a striking visual style that has come to be known as fantastic
realism. Another popular form during these years was the short animated film, in which still
images are drawn or photographed on single frames and then joined un such way as to suggest
movement. Emile Cohl developed this technique, creating nonnarrative films such as Brains
Repaired (1911) by combining drawings, photographs, and live action. The principal
difference of the films d’art was that the extreme deference paid to the older medium,
however perverse, meant that whole plays rather than fragments were recorded exactly as
performed. The most consequential of the series was Queen Elizabeth (1912), directed by
Louis Mercanton and Henri Desfontaines, and starring Sarah Bernhardt and Lou Tellegen.
Chapter 2 Rise of the American Film
Although the French and the Italians had been the first to arrive at feature-length films, and
although the French motion-picture industry had achieved unquestioned world dominance by
1910, the United States was now in a position to pursue that development as no other country
could. With its sizable moviegoing public, an economy stimulated rather than drained by war,
a tradition of business expertise, and film makers of considerable inventiveness and
occasional genius, the United States had a crucial advantage at this important stage. First was
the culmination of Griffith’s earlier experimentation in film form. Second, a very special
tradition of American screen comedy began in the output of Mack Sennett and his co-workers,
most notably Charles Chaplin. Finally, the new and prototypical systems of mass production,
distribution, and exhibition evolved, laying the groundwork for subsequent economic
expansion.
What was needed to shake film completely free from the stage, in a way so conspicuous that
no one could fail to understand, was probably the kind of spectacular grandeur represented by
Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Nothing like these two films,
in their size and intricacy of conception and in their mingling of history with passionate
argument, had appeared before them. The Birth of a Nation broke all sorts of precedents.
Even in the production, its costs (approximately $110,000), was said to be five times grater
than the next largest sum spent on an American film up to that time. Thoroughly embodied in
the film is an assumption of innate inferiority of black people. Given the film’s enormous
popularity, Griffith’s assumptions must have been shared by a substantial number of his white
contemporaries.
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