Transcript Doing Film History & The Origins of the Movies

Jaakko Seppälä
The Magical Attractions of Early Cinema &
The International Expansion of Cinema
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Brighton and After
• For decades early cinema was a neglected field of
study
• Early cinema was seen as an elementary stage of
cinematic evolution
• International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) held a
symposium in Brighton in 1978
• The event brought together film archivists and film
historians around a common purpose
• Early cinema began to be understood as a period that
possessed a different conception of space, time and
narrative form from the way in which these issues were
approached in the later classical cinema
The Cinema of Attractions
• For a long time the history of early cinema was
theorised under the hegemony of narrative films
• Early cinema (films made before 1906/1907) is now
understood as the cinema of attractions
• This cinema celebrates its ability to show something
• In the first few years the film projector was the
attraction
• Then the demonstration of the possibilities of cinema
continued in films
• What ever the attraction is, it is of interest in itself
Actualities and Trick Films
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Many early films are non-fiction films – actualities
These films use footage of real events
Topics of actualities: parades, sports, shipwrecks etc.
News events were covered on location where they
happened but also recreated in studios
Line between fact and fiction was not sharply drawn
Trick films are cinematic magic tricks
These films are essentially devoid of plot
Special effects were used to show what was possible
Early Story Films
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First story films were comic skits
Before 1903 mainly single-shot films
In many of these films there is no sense of depth
Longer multi-shot films became common from 1903
Reasons: artistic innovation, product differentiation,
enabled to sell more feet of film, more efficient to shoot
films in studios than to make actualities on location
• Simple narratives that follow action in linear fashion
• New multi-shot film genre: the chase film
• Common and popular genre internationally in 1903-1905
The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903)
Contextualising Early Films
• Early films need to be studied in the context of the screen
• The exhibitor, rather than the image-maker, generally held
editorial control and was responsible for what is now called
postproduction
• The exhibitor bought single-shot films and created film
programs
• Lecturing, vocal acting, music, sound effects etc.
• Early story films were often based on well known myths,
fairy tales and nursery rhymes
• Audiences were familiar with these (prior knowledge)
Tinted film
Toned film
Blue Tone and Rose Tint
Stencil Colour
Nickelodeons
• Itinerant movie-show people played an important role
in the creation of audiences for films outside the
largest cities
• In the United States storefront nickelodeons in large
cities began operating in 1904 and 1905
• Soon nickelodeons opened in every larger town
• Preconditions: film production on a large scale and film
exchanges
• In 1910 26 million Americans visited nickelodeons
every week (mass entertainment)
A Nickelodeon
The International Expansion
• Before the turn of the decade cinema was truly an
international phenomenon
• Films travelled freely across boarders
• A typical film show consisted of films made in
various countries
• There were no national cinemas and it did not
much matter where a film was made
• Filmmakers influenced each other
• This was an era of experimental filmmaking
Georges Méliès (France)
• Stage Magician (Theatre Robert Houdin)
• In 1896 Méliès bought a projector from R. W Paul
and built his own film camera
• Made films for his own company Star Film
• The master of the trick film
– Stop motion
– Superimpositions
• In many ways these films are excessively theatrical
• Méliès was internationally successful until 1905
Georges Méliès (1861-1938)
Pathé Frères (France)
• Pathé Frères was formed in 1896
• The company produced film equipments and films
• Pathé camera was the most popular film camera in the
world before the 1920s
• The company produced all kinds of films but in the early
1900s it was best known for its story films (fréeries)
• Pathé became the first vertically integrated film company
in the world when it opened its own film theatre in 1906
• The largest and most important film company in the
world before the Great War
Film d’Art
• Film d’Art was a small company founded in 1908 by Paul
Latiffe
• The company had good connections to the theatre world
• Film d’Art produced prestigious art films films for upper
class audiences
• L’assassinat du duc de Guise (1908)
• Legitimate actors, scripts written by famous dramatists and
original scores by well known composers
• Film as art
• In 1911 the company was in debt and had to be sold
British Cinema
• British cinema had an influential and innovative
beginning
• Silent British films made after 1905 have been
neglected (and/or considered bad)
• A large number of phantom ride films in early 1900s
– Dolly shot films inspired by Lumière films
• The Brighton School (Williamson & Smith)
– Ingenuity in editing and shooting practices
• Rescued by Rover (1905)
Pendlebury Colliery 1900
Italy
• Fiction film production began in 1905
• In the early 1910s Italy was one of the major powers in
world cinema
• Early film production: actualities, historical films and
slapstick comedies
• Soon Italy was known for historical epics
– The zenith of achievement: Cabiria (1914)
• First feature films were made in the early 1910s
• Diva films (Lyda Borelli & Francesca Bertini)
• Strongman films (Maciste)
Lyda Borelli
Bartolomeo Pagano