FTVMS 101 - Notes - Week 1

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OHPs for FTVMS 101 Film History Lectures (Wks 1 & 2)

Ways of approaching film history

• Technological history
• Biographical approach
• Industrial approach
• Social/cultural approach
• Aesthetic history

Early film Pioneers

Eadweard Muybridge

Étienne-Jules Marey

Lumière Bros

Thomas Edison

George Méliès

George Albert Smith

Cecil Hepworth

Edwin S Porter

Pathé Frères

DW Griffith

Charlie Chaplin

Early Production Companies

Biograph

Vitagraph

Essanay

Lubin Melies

Pathé Selig

Film making in the Early Years - 1900- 1906

• Understanding on continuity of movement
• Increase in editing
• Cuts and dissolves
• Fades
• Wipes (Mary Jane’s Mishap)
• Cross cutting
• Superimpositions (dreams, memory, visions)
• Dialogue titles
• Trick fx – (Méliès, early Hepworth/Bamford)
• Additional lighting (arc lighting – Rescue by Rover

Overall - techniques developing;

• Cutting to a closer shot within the scene
• Increased use of POV
• Elaboration of the ‘chase’ sequence (cross-cutting)
• Additional lighting for effect (not just practical)

Griffith was using or experimenting with by 1912;

• The close up
• Tracking shot
• High angle
• Flashback
• Insert
• Effect lighting
• Masking
• Fades (in and out)
• Dissolves

Similarities between Griffith and Charles Dickens:

Understood that a good story depended on well developed characters

• Melodrama
• Real locations
• Obsession with fine detail (description in D, attention to Mise en Scene – G)
• Exaggerated characterisation (but with core of truth)
• Sentimentality
• Subtext of religion – definable attitude
• Keen regard for social justice
• Parallel action (dramatic tension in literature and cinema)

Griffith’s developing talents (clear even in early films)

• Ability to get performance from an actor (Lillian Gish, Mae March, Blanche Sweet)
• Rehearsed (as in theatre)
• Blocked out scenes, then shot L.S., then M.S.
• Viewed dailies (rushes) to identify the exact placement of the CUs to extend the story telling and construct the emotional climax

All the elements of the narrative film were there by this time but not fully exploited – Birth of a Nation changed all of that in the American industry.

What ever you think of the subject matter and social politics of Birth of a Nation – the historical importance of the film within film history cannot be ignored.

It was also the film that bought in the intelligentsia/ middle class to the cinema which initially they had scorned a populist entertainment for the lower classes.

DEVELOPMENT PHASES OF FILM HISTORY

1) Prehistory of film;

Evolution of other art forms that influenced film ;

• Theatre (Victorian Melodrama)
• Pantomime
• Portrait photography (hand tinting of photo portraits).

Early years based on creating optical illusions using animation rather than on the elements of photography.

• Muybridge and Marey – photographing movement
• Thomas Edison , the kinetograph and the kinetoscope (1893) – viewing contained in ‘boxes’.

Period ends with the development of the cinematographe (Lumière Bros 1895).

2) 1896- 1905

Rapid increase of cinema as a public entertainment.

1-2 reel films (10-15 mintes)

3) 1905 – 1912 – the Nickelodeon Era

• 1908 MPPC – Motion Picture Patents Company

This period ends with the development of the feature-length film (Griffith – Birth of a Nation)

1909 National Board of Censorship (Birth of a Nation first film to be scrutinised).

1922 – Hays code

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM

Key industry developments in the 1910s:

1. Feature film - dominant form of film.
2. Building of Picture Palaces (Civic).
3. Emergence of the star system

1914 – Industry moves from NY to LA into Hollywood location. (NY remained ‘art/fine art centre).

Industry organisation;

Vertical integration combining;

Production, distribution and exhibition.

Major Studios (The Big Five):

Paramount (Famous Players) 
Warner Brothers (including First National)
MGM (Loews Inc )
Fox – (became Twentieth Century Fox 1935)
RKO-Radio - set up by the Radio Company of America

RCA (after sound arrived in 1927)

The minor studios (known as the ‘Little Three;

Universal

Columbia

United Artists (Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin and D. W. Griffith in 1919)

The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America Inc. (1922)