Light and Shadow
As the United States was clumsily developing its film-making, another country was proving to be astonishingly advanced for the time.
Italy had been steadily progressing so as to be able to create an historical epic on the scale of “Quo Vadis?” (Enrico Guazoni, 1912). This Italianate flair for the historical epic and for melodrama can be found in their genius for grand opera which they had been re-fining since 1607. By the time of “Cabiria” (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) the Italian cinema reigned supreme in its ability to create epic works with décor and visual sweep, a special talent they were still proving half a century later with the American super-production “Quo Vadis?” (1951) and “Cleopatra” (1963), all made at the huge and brilliantly – equipped Cinecitta studios in Rome.
The silent Italian spectacles mentioned above were an influence on the greatest figure in early cinema, D. W. Griffith (1875 – 1948). He is credited with developing the techniques of filmmaking such as close-ups, long shots, fades, flashbacks and crosscutting, thus creating its basic vocabulary. His early career had been as an unsuccessful actor, but by 1908 he had turned to directing (“The Adventures of Dolly”), but by 1913 he had made a four-reel film (i.e. 40 minutes) on a biblical subject, “Judith of Bethulia.”
Ambition and talent spurred him on to further experimentation and ideas and in 1915 he created his first masterpiece, “The Birth of a Nation,” which cost an unprecedented $110,000, a fortune for the time. It was a three-hour epic on the American Civil War, a film with remarkable confidence and narrative sweep. With this visually complex piece, American cinema had grown up.
In America and France in particular, a popular form of cinema was the serial, in which heroes and heroines experienced exciting and dangerous situations, which were shown to audiences in weekly instalments over many months. Each episode of a story ended on a nail-biting scene (where do you think the term “cliff-hanger” came from?), which would make audiences want to return. This technique is still, of course, employed in TV soaps. The early French serials, which started as early as 1913, such as “Fantomas,” “Vampires” and “Judex”, had mysterious, sinister and surreal elements.
Americans had their own highly successful serial too, “The Perils of Pauline.” Unfortunately, however, the racist depiction of a heroic Ku Klux Klan (White supremacists) and white actors in black face make it almost unwatchable in many scenes today. At the time there were demonstrations and riots and it was banned in the more liberal American cities. This powerful but flawed film, with its strange combination of technical sophistication and Victorian socio-political crudity, had changed cinema forever.
With his next film, “Intolerance” (1916), Griffith’s genius outstripped his business sense and the $2,000,000 budget almost ruined him. He was still paying off his debts twenty years later. The complex narrative told four overlapping stories about man’s intolerance of his fellow man and dealt with the Fall of Babylon, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (Paris, 1572), Christ’s crucifixion and a modern tale of the New York poor. Griffith possibly overreached himself with its complexity and scale and there were numerous complaints about the narrative confusion. The truth was, it was too advanced for its time and D.W Griffith was way ahead of his audiences. What had originally been planned for eight hours was eventually cut to three and a half.
Griffith continued making remarkable, if often sentimental, films over the next decade such as “Broken Blossoms,” “Way Down East” and “Orphans of the Storm,” but his largely Victorian style seemed increasingly at odds with the Jazz Age and the materialist 1920s and he ended his life a neglected alcoholic.
A happier lot was enjoyed by the other significant figure in early cinema, the Englishman Charles Chaplin (1889 – 1977), who began as an acrobatic comedian in the English music halls before emigrating to the U.S.A, where he made increasingly profitable and clever little films from 1914 on. His comedic style transcended language barriers and made him the world’s first international film star. His films became more ambitious and he was a true “auteur” (ie. creative artist) directing, producing, acting, writing and composing music. He also founded the studio United Artists in 1919 with Griffith and two great stars of the period, Fairbanks and Pickford. In his often sentimental style, he showed himself to be, like Griffith, a Victorian at heart but, at his best, his films were very funny and charmingly innocent in a world which was becoming increasingly brutal and cynical.
In the third part of this overview of the silent cinema, amongst other things, we will look at the golden age of the German cinema, French artistic and technical developments, Russian use of film as a propaganda tool and the beginning of the U.S studio system. KR
