" We did n’t need dialog , we had faces ! " In the 1950 film " Sunset Boulevard , " Norma Desmond , a star of the silent screen played by Gloria Swanson , has faded into obscurity with the sensitive that made her famed . She endure in a phantasy world , plotting her impossible comeback and host carte party populated by other former stars like Buster Keaton and Anna Nilsson .
Desmond and her friends are the casualties of a watershed decade in the history of film . In many ways , " Sunset Boulevard " is an homage to the 1920s , a period that saw the transition from understood pic to the " talkies , " the development of heroic movie theater , and the birth of Westerns and other legendary genres .
In Hollywood , this was the era of Douglas Fairbanks , Mary Pickford , Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino . Cecil B. DeMille ruled the box office , and Greta Garbo ruled the screen . In the Soviet Union , the Russian Formalists tap a brief windowpane of creative exemption to revolutionizefilmmaking techniques , while visual artists around the populace from Japan to France were finding novel ways to turn over the spiritualist into a ethnical force .
10: California Is Easier
" Ben - Hur"was an epic in every way possible . The newfangled studio of Metro Goldwyn Mayer ( MGM ) wanted to make its marker and choose to do so with a cinematic version of a hugely successful stage play that was itself an adaptation of a best - selling novel . Set in the time of Christ , " Ben - Hur " is the story of a moneyed young Judaic human being who is enslave by the Romans , pass over paths with Jesus and becomes a rockstar charioteer .
It was snuff it to be a big , lavish production from the commencement , but to up the ante , MGM determine to take the entire movie on location in Italy . They did n’t numerate on the land ’s new loss leader , Benito Mussolini , who was in a virulently anti - American mood when yield began . Labor disputes , mayhap fomented by Mussolini himself , delayed filming substantially . At one dot , director Fred Niblo discovered that some of the Italian extra were planning to fetch undesirable genuineness to a conflict scene , having organized themselves into pro- and anti - fascistcamps and sharpen the prop swords .
Several extras nigh overwhelm during a gravy boat - sinking scene , astuntmanperished while filming the legendary chariot race and even the star , Ramon Navarro , escaped death by a hair ’s largeness . Astoundingly , more than a hundred horses also lost their life for that reason , which was peopled by K of extras and shot by 42 cameras .
Even though the picture show was a box - business office smash-up , it lose money because of cost - overproduction . For more than two X after the release of " Ben - Hur , " Hollywood stayed home , preferring tobuildmassive sets ( even the Vatican ! ) on its own backlots rather than escape the hazard of foreign sword [ root : Hagopian ] .
9: How to Montage
One hundred fifty - five shots in five minutes . It ’s hard to exaggerate the impact of the famed " Odessa Steps " succession in Sergei Eisenstein ’s groundbreaking 1925 work , " Battleship Potemkin . " Conceived as a Sovietpropagandafilm ground on a historical consequence , the story begins with the mutiny of the gang of the eponymous Russian Navy warship . Sailing into the porthole of Odessa , the crew goes ashore where local citizen garner to bear out them . Tzarist soldiers massacre the gathering on the Odessa gradation . Among the most famous range in the scene , Eisenstein intercuts a guesswork of a child carriage careening down the step ( baby on circuit card ) with harrowing footage of the carnage taking place all around it .
The " Odessa Steps " succession is considered Eisenstein ’s most successful illustration of his theory of collage , which amounts to this : The sum of the voice is capital than the whole . Two or more images intimately juxtapose through editing could , Eisenstein theorized , make an impression beyond that which the images themselves represented . He was right . When it come up right down to it , everything from " Citizen Kane " to " Gangnam Style " is unthinkable without montage . Thanks , Sergei [ root : Johnson ] .
8: Stars Fall, Stars Rise
" They took the idols and smashed them , the Fairbankses , the Gilberts , the Valentinos ! And who ’ve we become now ? Some nonentity ! " It ’s impossible not to quote from " Sunset Boulevard " again . Norma Desmond ’s financial statement refers to the fable that the stars of the mute epoch fall sharply from near - godlike condition to draw a blank has - beens haunting their extravagantmansions .
And it ’s true the qualities that made one a still star rarely read to the " talkies . " roleplay in silent picture was really a form of mime and required as much expressive physicality as possible . Actors moved freely around the set with the director clapperclaw commands as the film rolled . Now , suddenly , the set was mute and gesture were restrict during takes . energizing actors like Douglas Fairbanks could n’t hurl themselves around the set , but had to stay practically motionless while speak into a hiddenmicrophone .
In a few cases , foreign or workings - class accent get in the way , but more often the difficulty lie with the new mode of performance demanded .
As many of the old guard choose to retire or were demo the door , novel acts from the earthly concern of theatre and vaudeville fill their shoes . Formerly unsung performers like James Cagney and Barbara Stanwyck shot to fame in short order [ seed : Crafton ] .
7: Vertical Integration is Profitable!
In 1948 , the U.S. political science take Hollywood to royal court . To be accurate , it took the " big five " studios to tourist court under the Sherman Anti - Trust laws , alleging the picture show behemoths were operating illegal monopolies . The governance acquire the case , signaling the starting time of the destruction of the so - predict " studio apartment system " of Hollywood ’s Golden Age .
It all begin in the 1920s when a humble group of knock-down studios began a process economist like to call " erect consolidation " [ source : Hansen ] . This is a fancy way of state they master the movie business from script to field of operations seat . One by one , manufacturer - distributor get buying up theaters , and by 1929 the five majors ( Paramount , Fox , MGM , RKO and Warner Bros. ) who would rule Hollywood for the next two decades were established and vertically integrate from top to bottom .
When these five go about crap a film , they used their in - house writers to craft script for their in - menage directors to put their in - house doer on film that would be cut by their in - planetary house editors into features that would then play in the theaters they owned across the nation .
Vertical integration was hugely profitable for the majors , and while account of classic picture came out of the studio apartment system , there was also a flock of dross . Part of the problem was that the studios used a recitation called " block booking , " whereby a house would be obliged to grease one’s palms a readiness of five film , one of them good and the residue not . It was a system Life magazine called " million - dollar mark second-rater " in an article lionize the end of the studio organization [ source : Hodgins ] .
6: Morality Matters
It was 1921 , and Fatty Arbuckle was twit high on his success as a regular in the Keystone Cops serial publication . He was so popular that Paramount sign a three - year , $ 3 million contract with him . A few months later , his career was in ruins . At a political party he hosted , a young womanhood was establish deadened in the bath , and Arbuckle was charged with colza andmurder . After two mistrial , Arbuckle finally was found not shamed — although he was fined $ 500 for serving alcohol during his Prohibition - era political party .
It was n’t just Arbuckle who was touch on by the malicious gossip ; public legal opinion wrick against the pic business in general .
follow Paramount flounder , Universal Studios decided on a radical answer to possible scandals . It introduce a " morals clause " into its contracts . The article read , in part , " The player ( actress ) agrees to conduct himself ( herself ) with due regard to public convention and ethical motive . … In the event that the actor ( actress ) violates any term or provision of this paragraph , then the Universal Film Manufacturing Company has the right hand to cancel and annul this contract . "
variation of that clause have been with us ever since . When you listen of companies send away contract bridge with Kate Moss for getting caught usingcocaine , or Mel Gibson for his anti - Semitic rant , it all goes back to Roscoe " Fatty " Arbuckle [ author : Pinguelo ] .
5: The Sound of Musicals
jazz them or hate them , musicals shape a lively genre of celluloid , and it ’s hard to believe there was a clock time when plastic film existed without them . But it goes without saying that the silence of silent movies scarcely ply a glad metier for those brash singing and dance spectacles that would hail to dominate the mid - century box office .
Filmmakers had been try out with sound for years before Warner finally brought out what is by and large recognized as one of the first talking picture feature of speech in 1927 . " The Jazz Singer " is the taradiddle of a Judaic choirmaster ’s Word who ache to be ajazzperformer rather than following in the family tradition . Starring Broadway sense experience Al Jolson , it was a major hit , proving to the skeptics that " talking pictures " were financially executable . It also happened to be a musical .
It was the nascency of a musical genre , and Hollywood promptly leap out on control panel . Just two year after , the studios were releasing " Broadway Melody , " " The Hollywood Revue , " " The Cocoanuts " and " On with the Show . " As for " The Jazz vocalist , " while it continue to occupy an important historical position in the history of moving-picture show , the fact that the most significant scenes feature Jolson in blackface run to make forward-looking audience squirm [ source : Gioia ] .
4: Dialogue Needs Writers
talkie take dialog , and dialogue necessitate writers . Hollywood transport out its siren call , and East Coast writers go west . In 1926 the celebrated journalist Herman Mankiewicz arrived in Tinseltown and prove himself as one of the most importantscreenwritersof the twentieth C . In a now - famous wire , he recruited his friend Ben Hecht to link him , stating that " 1000000 are to be grabbed out here and your only challenger is half-wit . Do n’t let this get around . "
While some writers made out well , studio executives ordinarily viewed writer as hacks and gave them little recognition and even less remuneration . In 1920 an informal lodge of author forge , call itself the Screenwriters Guild . The Guild would finally become an influential union , which today exists as the hefty Writers Guild of America .
As for " Manky , " he did indeed make a flock of money , compose more than 40 playscript including his noted collaboration with Orson Wells on " Citizen Kane . " But in the obituary he wrote for Mankiewicz , Hecht lamented his friend ’s success , believing that it had drive him to an other death [ source : Rothman ] .
3: Talkies Won’t Kill the Movies
In his 1928 book , " Heraclitus or the Future of Films , " the writerErnest Betts despaired . He conceive that the advent of talkie signaled " the most spectacular act of self - destruction that has yet come out of Hollywood , and violates the film ’s proper part at its informant . The soul of celluloid — its smooth-spoken and full of life silence — is destroyed . The film now returns to the carnival whence it came . "
Betts was hardly alone . Critics from Paul Rotha to Robert Herring were convinced that the talkies were cinematic toxicant . In the 1920s dumb cinema had reached expressive heights with films like Murnau ’s " Sunrise " and Dreyer ’s " Passion of Joan of Arc . " Bringing in audio , the skeptics reason , would sully the honor of the silent prowess - form .
Aesthetically verbalise , they had a point : Because of the limitation of the new applied science , earlysoundfilms are rarely take works of cinematic artistry . Because the microphone were stationary , the performances were wooden and the camerawork static . As filmmaker adapted , however , they prove the critics faulty , creating the often over-the-top movie theatre of the thirties .
In the meantime , early sound films might not have been made to tolerate the test of time , but they did rake in the dollar sign . The late 1920s saw earnings for the major studio apartment skyrocket . Warner , for instance , go from earning $ 2 million in 1928 to $ 14 million in 1929 [ source : Gomery ] .
2: Documentaries Are Powerful
Traditional histories of documentary films indicate a kind of instinctive organic evolution of the shape as follow : When theLumière pal , who were among account ’s first cinematographers , started film workers leaving their Lyon picture taking factory in the 1880s , they were make the first baby step toward document the world as it existed around them . Then , in 1922 , Robert Flaherty added narration flair when he made the legendary " Nanook of the North " — anddocumentaryfilm was born .
But in a closely argued essay , cinema theorist Bill Nichols argues that the documentary form really pass maturity in the 1920s because it was needed . This was an era when populations around the world were hard at work forge national identities . documentary film , splendidly , give the depression that they ’re simply observing reality when , in fact , they ’re also forge it . This calibre made the culture medium an priceless prick of state control by affirming certain cultural narratives and orthodoxies . By the same token , it made documentary film dangerous . If the culture medium could toenail the party line and affirm a suitable world , it could also disrupt it . That ’s why , Nichols argues , docudrama film of the 1920s is closely align with our final topic : the modernist avant - garde [ seed : Nichols ] .
1: Cinema Can Be Art
When the developingtechnology of filmcrossed paths with the modernist avant - garde movement , there were extraordinary consequence . While Russian constructivist like Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov were experiment with film technique under the guise of making Soviet propaganda film , the European avant - garde also began playing wildly with the metier .
The baron of the documentary image together with the " revolutionary juxtapositions of time and space allowed by montage " were resistless gene for creative person like Man Ray , Albert Kahn and Luis Bunuel [ source : Nichols ] . Perhaps the most famous work to come out of that full stop is " Un Chien Andalou , " a 1929 quislingism betweenSalvador Daliand Luis Bunuel . intimately a century by and by , the surrealist film still holds the power to shock . A scene involving a razor and an eyeball has been called " the most notorious opening sequence in picture history " [ source : Hoberman ] .
Made just a year later , its sexually explicit sequel , " L’Age d’Or , " was so inflammatory it provokedriotswhen screened and was quick banned by the Paris police . If nothing else , the response serves as an other demonstration of movie ’s top executive as an artistic medium [ source : Hoberman ] .
