Film History

Yasmin Cwajg

History of Film 211V

Prof. Weinberger

05/12/06

Final examination N°2

To say that because of the influence of such giants as Edison, Griffith and Welles, and films like Scarface, On the Waterfront and Chinatown, the film industry is essentially an American industry with Europe, Iran, and China as its beneficiaries, is an exaggeration. North America’s influence first on Europe, and then on Asia was reciprocal all through the twentieth century.

Since its beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, the film industry was encouraged by American filmmakers. Edison was almost obsessed, trying to invent a machine capable of producing moving images. Two decades earlier, a British man, Eadward Muybridge, was a pioneer, designing a system to capture instantaneous motion pictures. While Edison tried to make his one-person-only Kinetograph succeed, in France the Lumière brothers were accomplishing the creation of the Cinématographe: a portable device which reproduced moving images on larger screens.

In other countries in Europe, directors were also very aware of the advances in filming technology. As they competed to be the firsts, they also shared information and complemented each other with innovative methods and shooting techniques. Even though Edison is known as the “Father of Film”, he would not be considered so had Muybridge and the Lumière brothers not played in the same race and revealed the information he needed to create, or at least, gain the copyright for the Vitascope. It was North America who developed the largest and most significant part of the film industry, expanding it.

It is a fact that North American film makers made great movies which influenced many directors around the world, and lead to the evolution of several different styles. However, as both North American and non-American film industries grew up, they turned to different genres and produced movies at different speeds.

The film industry as a whole is not essentially North American. Nevertheless, the commercial film industry has been. The most artistic and meaningful film industry has characteristically, not developed in America, but in Europe and Asia. As North America started to produce massive amounts of movies, trying to reach as many people as possible, their films became more commercial. Most of them followed the same lines, having classical traditional messages, which appealed to the typical American “middle class.” Producers, directors and investors thought of business strategies (such as remakes and sequels) in order to avoid monetary risks. In addition to all this, an increased focus on special effects gave little chance for independent directors to succeed. They needed to wait for “the big fish” to run out of ideas to be able to have their fifteen minutes of fame.

In contrast, Non-American countries showed a constant progress in the quality of their films. They were not as massive as North American films, but in each country a new style was born. In some countries, the smaller size of the industry helped many independent directors to find support, and finally come up with great films. Most of the movies produced in these countries were vanguardists, with more complex messages, often being a political means to convey ideas, or artistic pieces to diffuse rebelling factions. Very rarely did they fall on the concept of sequels to guarantee success. Filmmakers from these countries had a strong sense of art and creativity which let them experiment with new forms of filming and, thus, move in different directions. Each country designed a new and distinctive style.

The ex-USSR realist style called montage cannot be separated from politics. USSR what Griffith had demonstrated in the USA: films are a great means to promote political propaganda. Battleship Potemkin by Eisenstein is a great example of how art could also convey the ideals of the revolution. The movie presents the class struggle, and the oppressed class being exploited by the Bourgeoisie. As it is expected in a socialist regime, the filmmakers were government employees; their films were made to serve the state, who not only had political interests, but also economical since the state financed the films. Thus, movies and movie makers were subjected to strong censorship.

Griffith was a big influence on Russian filmmakers; his Birth of a Nation can be associated with Battleship Potemkin. Even though their messages are different, the style and the attempt to be a political document are the same. They both have an objective of making it very clear who the good and evil characters are. There is a lot of movement and, as most Hollywood stories will later develop, they have clear happy endings in which the good always wins.

Germany’s expressionism originated in the period between the two world wars. Since Germany was the great loser of that war, it is paradoxical how its popularity in movies increased so significantly after the First World War. Nevertheless, it is also understandable that the socio-political situation in Germany was about to explode and a new style, more representative of the new values and principles, had to come up. The Weimar Republic was weak and powerless, the rates on unemployment and inflation were getting higher every day, and the means for expression were becoming a big issue. Artists seeking news had a terribly creative period that ranged from painting, dancing, and architecture to films. In 1919 Robert Wiene directed “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. This movie marked the beginning of the expressionist period in Germany. Differently from North America’s movies, this film had totally complex characters; there were not any good or evil, neither villains nor heroes. Human personality was portrayed as deeper than the traditional opposing facets. The world was also conceived differently; it was not presented as “what we see” but as the states of mind of the people who were seeing it.

Another original aspect of this new style was the misè en scene, influenced by Meliès who had revolutionized film production with his “Trip to the Moon” (1902). Wiene created a special environment for the movie, as opposed to North Americans who shoot on location. The detailed lighting and scenery, which most of the time was not very realistic or believable, was very distinctive of Germany’s expressionism. Even “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” influenced North American horror films and also lead to the creation of the “Film Noir”: dark movies involving crime in which the hero is not a typical one, but a character full of trouble. Great directors like Alfred Hitchcook and Fritz Lang studied in Germany and then succeeded in the USA. As essential as the North American film industry was, still, it was also affected and shaped by Germany. Welles’s Citizen Kane

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