The Heyday of the Silents, Sound Cinema & Avant-Garde

1. Jaakko Seppälä The Heyday of the Silents, Sound Cinema & Avant-Garde http://www.helsinki.fi/taitu/tet/Jaakko/WorldFilmHistory1.html

2. 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, theatrical and realwere blurring • Realist illusion as the dominant aesthetic

3. 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

4. Lillian Gish (1993-1993)

5. Harold Lloyd (1893-1971)

6. 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?

7. The Three-Point-Lighting System

8. 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

9. Will Harrison Hays (1879-1954)

10. ”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) was too great for any one country to compete with • In 1924 European film industries began to cooperate and to distribute each other’s films • Continental films instead of national films • Synchronised sound, depression and new political attitudes ended the pan European movement

11. 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 Singer premiered 6 October 1927

12. Sound-On-Disc

13. Sound-On-Film

14. 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 accents and 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

15. Anémic Cinéma (Duchamp, 1926)

16. 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, cinéma pur, lyrical documentaries and experimental narrative