Arkansas Society for Cinema and Television Production (ASCTP)

(a Non-Profit Education Corporation)

contact: Gary William Jones gary@jonesfilmvideo.com

 

 

RTV 3303-001 Spring 2010  Class #3 Chapters 4-7

Uncle TomÕs Cabin (1927) / The Jazz Singer (1927)

 

Glossary of Film Terms:

http://www.filmsite.org/filmterms1.html

 

 

Cook, David A.  A History of Narrative Film, Third Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

 

Chapter 4: German Cinema of the Weimar Period, 1919-1929

 

Prior to the First World War, the German Cinema had reached a less advanced state of development than the cinemas of France, Italy, England, and the United StatesÉ(because)Éin GermanyÉthe cinema became a refuge for the illiterate, disenfranchised, and unemployed.  Consequently, very few educated Germans took films or filmmaking seriouslyÉMany early native films were frankly pornographic; almost all were technically crude. (p. 102)

 

Expressionism, a movement that began in German painting, music, architecture, and theater before the war (WWI) in reaction to the pervasive naturalism of late-nineteenth-century artÉUnlike naturalism, which represented objective reality, Expressionism attempted to represent the artistÕs subjective feelings in response to objective reality.  It employed a variety of nonnaturalistic techniques, including symbolism, abstraction, and perceptual distortionÉ.(p. 107)

 

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919) was one of the first German Expressionist films of note.  In a film like Caligari that required many dramatic lighting effects, it was cheaper and more convenient to simply paint light and shadow onto the scenery itself than to producr the effect electricallyÉyet another instance of the way in which technological necessity can foster aesthetic innovation in the cinemaÉthe angular distortion of the sets was clearly intended by Wiene to provide an objective correlative for the narratorÕs insanity, and for this reason Caligari became the progenitor and exemplar of the German Expressionist cinema. (p.111)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9WjHEKLMbc&feature=related (montage)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNDaifCMAdI&feature=related (introduction of Cesare the Somnamulist scene)

 

Fritz LangÕs Metropolis (1926, released 1927) presented a terrifying if simplistic vision of a twenty-first-century totalitarian society whose futuristic architecture and technology were rendered brilliantly concrete through the process and mode work of the special-effects cinematographer Eugen Schufftan. (p. 114)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yATrCTOgTLM&feature=related (sample scene)

 

The second major figure to emerge from the Expressionist movement was F.W. Murnau, whose highly stylized vampire film Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horrors, 1922, has become a classic of the genreÉ.Whereas CaligariÕs Expressionism was mainly graphic, NosferatuÕs is almost purely cinematic, relying upon camera angles, lighting, and editing rather than production design. (p. 117)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMl6hUZHBqY&feature=related (excerpts)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyBt5DDFcQY&feature=related (Shadow of the Vampire (2000) trailer

Chapter 5: Soviet Silent Cinema and the Theory of Montage, 1917-1931

 

Éat its birth, the Soviet cinema was a cinema of propaganda in documentary formÉin the midst of the this chaos (of the Bolshevik Revolution) the Bolshevik leaders looked to film as a means of reunifying their shattered nation.  As a party of two hundred thousand which had assumed the leadership of 160 million people, most of them illiterate, scattered across the single largest contiguous land mass in the world and speaking well over one hundred separate languages, the BolsheviksÕ most immediate task was one of communication and consolidation, and they saw film as the perfect medium for this endeavor.  Film, after all, speaks only one language—one that doesnÕt require literacy to comprehend—and, through mass distribution can communicate the same ideas to millions of people at once. (p. 132)

 

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was, with D.W. Griffith, one of the two pioneering geniuses of the modern cinema.  Yet, though their syntactical methods were similar and both worked on a epic historical scale, as artists the two men could hardly have been less alike.  Griffith was a sentimentalist whose values were typically those of the Victorian middle class.  His films were modernist in form, reactionary in feeling; they were seen by millions, and he made too many of them.  Eisenstein, by contrast, was a contemporary Marxist intellectual whose vibrantly revolutionary films, while few in number and seen mainly by other intellectuals, left an indelible mark on history and cinema alike.  Where Griffith was unschooled and instinctive, Eisenstein was a modern Renaissance man whose exaggerated intellectualism and omnivorous knowledge astonished all who knew him. (p. 141)

 

EisensteinÕs Battleship Potemkin (1925)Éhas been called the most perfect and concise example of film structure in the history of the cinema.  With The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Citizen Kane (1941), Potemkin is clearly one of the most important and influential films ever madeÉEisenstein created a completely new editing techniqueÉbased upon psychological stimulation rather than narrative logic, which managed to communicate physical and emotional sensation directly to the audience. (pp. 147-8)

 

The completed version of the film ran eighty-six minutes at silent speed (16 fps) and contained 1,346 shots—a remarkably high number when we consider that the released version of The Birth of a Nation, with a running time of 195 minutes, contained only 1,375 shots, or that the average American film of 1925 ran ninety minutes and contained approximately six hundred shots. (p.148)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps-v-kZzfec (Odessa steps sequence)

 

Eisenstein saw film editing, or montage, as a process which operated according to the Marxist dialectic.  This dialectic is a way of looking at human history and experience as a perpetual conflict in which a force (thesis) collides with a counterforce (antithesis) to produce from their collision a wholly new phenomenon (synthesis) which is not the sum of the two forces but something greater than and different from them bothÉEisenstein defined montage as a series of ideas or impressions which arise from Òthe collision of independent shotsÓÉjust as the individual words in a sentence depend for their meaning upon the words which surround them, so the individual shots in a montage sequence acquire meaning from their interaction with the other shots in the sequence. (p. 170)

 

Éas the Soviet leadership grew more and more authoritarian, the arts were pushed increasingly toward the narrow ideological perspective known as socialist realismÉThis was a prosaic and heavy-handed brand of didacticism which idealized the Soviet experience in order to inspire the masses with the glorious life under Lenin and, especially, Stalin.  The guiding principle was that individual creativity should be subordinated to the political aims of the stateÉ (p.194)

 

Chapter 6: Hollywood in the Twenties

 

The independent producers, led by Adolph Zukor, William Fox, and Carl Laemmle, had triumphed over the monopolistic Motion Picture Patents Company to become vertically integrated monopolies themselves, controlling their own theater chains and distributorshipsÉFilmmaking practices and narrative formulas were standardized to facilitate mass production, and Wall Street began to invest heavily in the industry for both economic and political gainÉ(p. 196)

 

(after a serious of Hollywood scandals) the frightened Hollywood producers formed a self-regulatory trade organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of American (MPPDA) in March, 19, amid much publicity, and hired President Warren G. HardingÕs postmaster general, Will Hays, for 150,000 dollars a year to head itÉ.producers were required to summit summaries of their screenplays to the Hays Office for approval.  But the only ÒcensorshipÓ consisted of informal advising according to the principle of Òcompensating valuesÓ wherebyÉ.vice could be flaunted for six reels so long as virtue triumphed in the seventh. (p. 216)

 

ÉCecil B. DeMille embraced the Òcompensating valuesÓ formula and made it uniquely his own in The Ten Commandments (1923) , a sex-and-violence-drenched religious spectacle that made him internationally famousÉon the whole DeMille was a great showman, rather than a great director, who incarnated the values of Hollywood in the twenties throughout his career.  He was extravagant, flamboyant, and vulgar, but he possessed a remarkable instinct for the dualistic sensibilities (some would simply say ÒhypocrisyÓ) of his middle-class American audiences, who paid by the millions for over fifty years to sit through his kinetic spectacles of sex, torture, murder, and violence so long as some pious moral could be drawn from them at the end. (p. 218)

 

By 1927, the studio filmmaking process had been standardized under the supervisory production system pioneered by Thomas Ince and Mack Sennett a decade before, and there was little place within the system for such an individual and eccentric talent as a on Stroheim or a Keaton or a GriffithÉThe coming of sound was to clinch the matter.  The studios had to borrow huge sums of money to pay for the conversion on the very eve of the Great Depression, which spurred them to increase the efficiency of their production process by totally effacing the concept of the personal director and replacing it with the concept of the executive producer, modeled on MGMÕs Irving ThalbergÉThus, the coming of soundÉmeant the transformation of a wildcat business run largely by filmmakers fascinated with the process of film itself into a large-scale technological industry controlled by corporate managers who exercised supreme authority over all artistic variables in order to maximize profitsÉgigantic corporate capitalism was born of the twenties.  That decade was the only time in the history of American film that so much talent has ever been allowed to display itself so extravagantly and magnificently, and then been so ruthlessly destroyed. (pp. 237-8).

 

Chapter 7: The Coming of Sound and Color, 1926-1935

 

After the invention of the cinema itself, the most important event in film history was the introduction of sound. (p. 239)

 

Vitaphone was a sophisticated sound-on-disc system employing multiple 33 1/3 rpm discs developed at great expense by Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories, a subsidiary firm of American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (AT&T), in blithe ignorance of (or at least indifference to) HollywoodÕs antipathy toward soundÉthe financially venturesome and, at the time, emphatically minor Warner Bros. Pictures decided to take a chance on soundÉThere was at first no question of making Òtalking pictures.Ó  Warner Bros.Õ notion was that Vitaphone could be used to provide synchronized musical accompaniment Éenhancing their appeal to the second-and third-run theaters that had no orchestras. (p. 243)

 

The Jazz SingerÉwas conceivedÉ.as a ÒsingingÓ rather than a ÒtalkingÓ picture, and all dialogue was to be provided by interpolated titles (intertitles).  But, during the shooting of two musical sequences, Jolson ad-libbed some dialogue on the set which Warners shrewdly permitted to remain in the finished filmÉ.Thus, we say that the ÒtalkiesÓ were born with The Jazz Singer not because it was the first feature-length film to employ synchronized dialogue but because it was the first to employ it in a realistic and seemingly undeliberate wayÉ.The combination of Jolson, Vitaphone, and synchronized dialogue made The Jazz Singer an international success from the date of its premiere on October 6, 1927É (p.246)

 

Another organization which hastened the conversion to sound was the Fox Film Corporation, like Warner Bros. a minor studio at the time.  In 1927 its president, William Fox acquired the rights to two sound-on-film processes andÉestablished Fox Movietone NewsÉthe first regular sound newsreel series, and its success was phenomenalÉsending camera crews around the world to interview everyone from George Bernard Shaw to the Pope, and delivering three to four newsreels to Fox theaters per week. (p. 247)

 

Warner BrosÉ.continued to lead the way.  Having produced the first Òpart-talkieÓ—The Jazz Singer—it went on to produce the first Ò100 percent all-talkieÓ—Lights of New York (Bryan Foy, 1928)É(which ran only fifty-seven minutesÉtwenty-two of its twenty-four sequences contained recorded dialogue, making it the first film in history to rely entirely upon the spoken work to sustain its narrative. (p. 248)

 

Éit is probably true that the introduction of sound, more than any other factor, enable Hollywood to survive the Great Depression, which began with the stock market crash of October 1929Éif the producers had waited till late October 1929—as they might well have done except for the daring of Warner Brothers and Fox—sound would have been impossible for ten more years, and receiverships (bankruptcy) would have come quite some time before 1932ÉWhen the Depression finally did hit Hollywood in 1932, the silent cinema was a distant memory.. (p.250)

 

 

 

(IMBD notes on The Jazz Singer):

Many documentaries and historians state that immediately after the release and success of The Jazz Singer that all of Hollywood switched to sound. This is not true for several reasons. First, there were two competing and incompatible sound systems. The Vitaphone process was cumbersome, relying on an electro-mechanical interface between the projector and the turntable. Fox's Fotofilm was a superior sound-on-film process that allowed for easier editing but required a costlier projector (the Vitaphone system would be quietly killed off by 1932). Secondly, either sound process nearly doubled the budget of a film. Thirdly, theater chains faced enormous conversion costs (MGM-parent company Loew's Inc. owned over 1,000 outlets, and took a deliberately slow wait-and-see attitude toward sound). The first feature film with all synchronous dialog was Lights of New York. Also, in the midst of the talkie-craze of 1928-30, studio bosses were faced with a limited amount of sound equipment and qualified sound technicians, causing them innumerable headaches over which productions to produce as talkies vs. silents. Also, silents were internationally marketable via cheap title card translations while talkies, prior to the advent of subtitles, usually required completely different foreign language versions to be produced simultaneously. Low budget producers of westerns along poverty row were especially impacted, with silents continuing in that market through the end of 1930. Many studios continued to produce both silent and sound versions of their films, including the classic All Quiet on the Western Front.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First feature-length movie with audible dialogue.

 

Al Jolson's famous line "you ain't heard nothin' yet" was an ad-lib. The intention was that the film should only have synchronized music, not speech, but Jolson dropped in the line (which he used in his stage act) after the song "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face". The director wisely left it in.

 

http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0018037/trivia