by Mark Cousins
The MPPC emphasized itself as a brand with the on-screen slogan, “Come and see an MPPC film”. The MPDSC realized that they had to do something equally distinctive, so they varied the schema. Instead of branding themselves, they branded the actors in their films. Previously, actors had seldom been named and audiences were not provided with information about them. In 1910 during the thick of the fight with the MPPC, Laemmle announced in the press that the Independent Motion Picture Girl of America or IMP Girl, the anonymous actress who had appeared in many of his films, had died. However, when she miraculously made an appearance to disprove this fact, Laemmle reported to the newspapers that the crowds were so hysterical that they tore off her clothes. This was equally untrue, but the ensuing furore burned her name, Florence Lawrence, into the public’s consciousness. Lawrence became a huge star, earning $80,000 in 1912. Two years later she had a serious injury and her career declined rapidly. By the 1930s, she was reduced to playing extras in crowd scenes and in 1938, aged forty-eight, she committed suicide by eating ant poison.
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Two of the world’s most famous movie stars – Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks (in the car) – are swamped by fans in Paris in 1920.
The star system had been born in all its extravagant, tawdry glory and while we cringe at its contemporary excesses, the cynicism of the early star-making PR men still takes the breath away. Theodosia Goodman was a hardworking actress in summer-stock repertory theatre, but Hollywood rechristened her Theda Bara (see page 34, 20), an anagram of “Arab death”. She started her life in Cincinnati, but the public was told that she was “born in the shadow of the Sphinx”. She wore indigo make-up and gave interviews while stroking a snake. The growing publicity machine, awash with such racial, sexual and class clichés, has remained central to the continuing exotic, erotic imagination of Hollywood. Public obsession with movie actors rocketed. At the same time as the Lawrence US phenomenon, Mistinguett emerged in France, but the Danish actress Asta Nielsen became perhaps more internationally famous than either. Nielsen was as popular in Russia and Germany as in Denmark. When the film star Mary Pickford and her husband Douglas Fairbanks visited Moscow, 300,000 people came out to see them. Pickford became the highest-paid woman in the world, earning $350,000 a year. A young British man in Hollywood, Charles Chaplin, would soon become the highest-paid man, grossing $520,000 plus bonuses in 1916.
Every aspect of the industry was affected by the star system. As the adoring public became increasingly interested in stars such as Lawrence, Nielsen and Mistinguett, moviemakers had to learn what their idols were thinking and feeling. This meant seeing their faces more clearly. Despite their use in films like Grandma’s Reading Glasses (UK, 1900), close-ups remained rare for some years. It was still the norm in 1908 to film the human body at full length (see the Duc de Guise stills on page 38), but in 1909, as film historian Barry Salt has discussed, American films started to include closer framing, from the knees up (26). This was known in Europe as the “American shot”.
It was not only the actors’ faces, but also their thoughts that audiences were interested in. As cinema was still silent, actors could not be heard, but filmmakers and story writers began to understand that audiences would be drawn into the film if they could understand what the actors were supposed to be feeling and feel it with them. Action in early silent film was usually caused by external forces of nature or accident: for instance, the firemen in Porter’s film rushed to the house because there was a fire. The actors trapped in the house were anonymous and the 1903 audience knew nothing about them. Now jump forward eight or ten years. What if it was Florence Lawrence trapped in that house, the Florence Lawrence the public had read about in the papers? Her audience would want to know how she was feeling, if she was scared or safe. To express these things, filmmakers had to move the camera closer and learn to use shots and cuts to reveal feelings. The star system ensured that psychology became the driving force of films, especially American ones.
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This still from Daisies illustrates how American directors began to shoot from the knees up, gradually getting closer to the actors. 1910
If filmmakers were uncoupling themselves from the cheap technical thrills of their earlier films, if they were starting to tell longer, more psychological and convoluted stories, if they were producing more and more films everyday, then new, respectable subject matter had to be found. They did this with their customary lack of guile. Between 1909 and 1912, eight versions of Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist were produced. In 1910, it is estimated that one third of all films were based on plays and a further quarter were adapted from novels. Shakespeare’s Hamlet was filmed twenty times in Italy, France, Denmark, Britain and the US in the fifteen years covered in this chapter. In the same period there were more than fifty films about the British sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. Producers did not shy away from real-life figures with scores of films on the lives of Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Jesus Christ and Theodore Roosevelt.
The rise of the star system, the Patents War and the move to Hollywood make 1908–12 a fascinating period for American cinema. The elements of the power of Hollywood fell into place and it geared itself up for domination of the world’s markets. But, until the First World War, other countries’ film output still had more commercial and artistic impact than the United States’. The French industry had stopped being a cottage one, for example. By 1907, around 40 per cent of films showing in US nickelodeons were made by one studio, Pathé, the Gaumont company also made films, distributed them and screened them. A third company, Eclair, even opened a studio in the US, as Pathé had also done. Further signs of the industrialization of French cinema was Pathé’s pioneering of serial films such as those starring André Deed. The success of these spawned many others, in particular the Italian Cretinetti series, again starring Deed after he had moved to the country from France. Most significant of such series were those of performer Max Linder, perhaps the most famous international film comedian in the run up to the First World War. Linder’s dapper loafer was developed and directed onscreen between 1905 and 1910 by directors such as Ferdinand Zecca and Alberto Capelini; from 1911 onwards he directed his films himself, establishing a precedent which Mack Sennett and Charles Chaplin would later follow.
Scandanavian cinema was also developing in the years before the First World War. In 1912, the most innovative use of film light was in the work of the Dane, Benjamin Christensen. Low-angle daylight contoured his imagery and sometimes the level of artificial light within a shot would be varied, to simulate a door closing or a lamp being switched on, as in Night of Vengeance (Denmark, 1915) (27). In the following year, the early films of Swedish directors such as Mauritz Stiller, Victor Sjöström and Georg af Klercker, though often based on literary source material, captured natural landscapes with a still, radiant grace, and themes of destiny and mortality were addressed with a maturity beyond that of contemporaneous filmmakers. Sjöström and Stiller became star directors and, as was to be the pattern for European talent, they accepted contracts with the Hollywood studios in 1923 and 1925 respectively.
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Benjamin Christensen’s striking use of side lighting to add drama to a scene in Night of Vengeance. Denmark, 1915.
India made what some say was its first film, Pundalik, in 1912. Based on the life of the Hindu saint of the same name, it was shot on location in Bombay by P.R. Tipnis and N.G. Chitre. Early Indian filmmaking was dominated by the artistic son of a Sanskrit scholar, D.G. Phalke (28). Having studied painting and architecture, the thirty-year-old Phalke went to London in 1910 and learnt film techniques from Cecil Hepworth at Walton Studios. Returning to Bombay in 1912 he set up Phalke Films and proceeded to make over forty silent feature films, often using innovative methods such as animated individual sequences, and one sound film, Gangavataran (India, 1937). Inspired by seeing The Life of Christ in Bombay in 1911, Phalke took the ancient stories of Indian myth which form The Mahabharata (collected
between 400BC and 400AD), and adapted them for screen. He created a whole genre, the mythological, which has survived to this day. Phalke’s first mythological was King Harishchandra (1913), in which a respected King is drawn into a mystical world and his honesty is tested by, among other things, three inflamed spiritual manifestations. King Harishchandra’s mythical suffering is curtailed when a god emerges to explain that the whole trial has been a test of his virtue.
Four types of film emerged in India in these early years, which would influence that country’s massive film culture thereafter. These were devotionals, about saints like Pundalik; mythologicals such as Phalke’s King Harishchandra; historicals, derived from novels and melodramas; and socials, derived from reformist theatre. While the style and meaning of Indian film would evolve along very different lines from those of Western cinema, the mixture of piety and biography, emotional excess and myth of early Indian cinema was comparable to what was then emerging from the Hollywood hills.
Concurrently, cinema was playing an important role in Mexico’s bloody civil war which would claim over a million lives between 1911 and 1917. Cameramen in the north of Mexico, like the intrepid Lumière employee Francis Doublier outside Moscow in 1896, filmed the battles of the revolutionary Pancho Villa. La vista de la revuetta/View of the Uprising (Mexico 1911), was shown in Mexico City and Monterrey where free tickets were given to the poor to encourage them to support Villa’s cause. Within a few years, Villa had become a star in his own right and, exhibiting some gall, the North American director, Raoul Walsh, paid him for the exclusive rights to film his campaigns. The revolutionary adjusted his battle plans and attack schedules to make them more appealing to Walsh’s camera.3 This, however, would not be the only time that the tail would wag the dog in this way, and a 1997 American movie, Wag the Dog, showed how war could accommodate politics and cinema. The real and the cinematic would dance an uneasy pas de deux throughout the twentieth century. The first important Mexican fictional films were produced in the 1930s and their subject was Pancho Villa.
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D.G. Palke on set, directing King Harishchandra. India, 1913.
Italian cinema of this time draws attention to itself because of its symbolic and technical innovations. Salt credits the first-known symbol in a film to Mario Cesarini’s La mala piñata/The Evil Plan, whose opening shot features a slithering snake, a malign symbol from the Book of Genesis, or earlier. The thirty-year-old Giovanni Pastrone directed the far more innovative Cabiria in 1913. He had made a dozen or so films before he embarked on this tale of a Sicilian slave girl, Cabiria, who is constantly rescued by another slave, the muscular Maciste, but none was on the ambitious scale of Cabiria. Pastrone filmed Cabiria’s near-sacrifice to Baal, Maciste’s adventures in Carthage and Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants. He shot for six months, at a time when many films were still completed in a matter of days. “The technical innovations and spectacular sets revolutionized cinema”, wrote film historian Georges Sadoul in 1965.4
Cabiria is a gigantic work whose scale, even viewed from the era of computer-generated imagery, is still surprising (29). Other epic films such as The Life of Christ (Pathé, France, 1910), Quo Vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, Italy, 1912) and King Harishchandra, had used fixed tableau shots, which would establish a grand setting and then cut to smaller courtly or domestic scenes. Pastrone, however, would dolly into those closer scenes, either by moving the camera forward, or forward and sideways, on a diagonal. Cinema had discovered a way of moving seamlessly from a wide visual frieze to medium shots. On its release, Cabiria was a sensation in Japan, Europe and, in particular the US, where, as mentioned in the previous chapter, its tracking shots came to be known as “Cabiria movements”. R.W. Paul’s simple dolly device found itself at the centre of the cinematic process.
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Cabiria’s gigantic sets established a bench-mark for epic filmmaking in the years to come. Director: Giovanni Pastrone. Italy, 1913.
However, it wasn’t only Italy that had discovered the epic sensuality made possible by Paul’s invention. In Russia, at the same time as Pastrone was filming, Tsar Nicolas II may have commented that cinema was an “empty, totally useless and even harmful form of enter-tainment … no importance whatsoever should be attached to such stupidities”,5 but forty-eight-year-old former caricaturist and painter Yevgeny Bauer was making Twilight of a Woman’s Soul (1913), which developed Paul’s early tracking shot even further. Like many of the eighty or more films he would make in the next four years, Twilight of a Woman’s Soul derived from the heady fatalistic naturalism of Russian literature in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The melancholic tone of Bauer’s film anticipated an intriguing divergence that emerged between Russian and American cinema in the years 1913 and 1914. In the second of these years, Russia’s entrance into the First World War closed its borders and no international films were shown. Isolated thus, in the three years prior to the Russian revolutions. Russian directors such as Bauer and the younger Yakov Protazanov made a string of great, sombre movies, only recently rediscovered. After Death (1913), A Life for a Life (1916), The Dying Swan (1917) and Protazanov’s wonderful Queen of Spades (1916) were indebted to the bleakness of Scandinavian films as well as Russian literature. Adapted from a short story by Alexander Pushkin, Queen of Spades (30) tells of the haunting of a Russian officer after he has sold his soul to the devil. Fate, destiny and natural forces foil human desire in these films. They were bleakly pessimistic in their endings, yet hugely popular with their paying Russian audiences.
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Many of the best Soviet films of the 1920s explored themes of tragedy and despair: Yakov Protazanov’s masterly Queen of Spades. Russia 1916.
As Russian cinema was unearthing buried layers of despair, a group of US songwriters, whose work would become the epitome of Hollywood optimism in the era of sound cinema, were starting to put pen to paper. Irving Berlin had his first worldwide hit with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911, and later he wrote the classic numbers, “Blue Skies”, “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “God Bless America”. The “Chin up, keep smiling through” message of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” became a national anthem of hope and also the basis of a movie, as did “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”. Meanwhile Yip Harburg was writing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, a leftist ballad about self-improvement which would anchor the classic American film, The Wizard of Oz (1939). Al Dubin wrote the lyrics for 42nd Street, which in 1942 became cinema’s archetypal story of the chorus girl getting her big break and becoming a star. The songs and themes of Berlin, Harburg and Dubin turned sound cinema in the US into the most optimistic cultural industry in the world, and in doing so gave America a signature. That signature has become blurred at times and even today filmmakers find it oppresive. The reason they are mentioned in the same breath as Bauer and Protazanov is that Berlin, Harburg and Dubin were also Russians.
The years 1913 and 1914 were crucial for cinema, with a divisive war starting just as film was beginning to get white hot. In 1913 New York City had 986 movie houses; a flamboyant director called Cecil B. DeMille directed the first feature film in Hollywood; Cabiria expanded the imaginative scale of movies; and Russian filmmakers were exploring darker themes. In fact, the films that were exported from Russia to America just before the war, and many since, had their endings tailored positively to make them appeal to American audiences. We have the first sense here, then, of the potential plurality in world cinema. The human appetite is broad and America, Scandinavia, Italy and Russia were starting to appeal to very different parts.
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An early example of the now familiar technique of reverse-angle cutting, in which we are shown the main character (top) and what she is looking at (bottom). His Last Fight. Director: Ralph Ince. USA, 1913.
In 1913 new racial ground was broken in US film. The Railroad Porter was a type of chase comedy that was becoming popular, but it had an all-black cast and a b
lack director, Bill Foster. Despite some further pioneers in the 1930s, it wouldn’t be until the 1970s that a range of black filmmakers emerged in the US and that the very first black film would be made in Britain. The first black feature film made in Africa by a black African was La Noire de… in 1967, well over seventy years after the first films were shown on that continent.
Another shift in the way films were made in America took place in the same year. In the first of two images from Ralph Ince’s His Last Fight, an actress on a boat watches something, in the second, the fighting crewmen whom she is watching are shown (31). There is nothing unusual in this to modern eyes, but such reverse angle cutting was not a routine technique at this time and Salt has pointed out that matched reverses between the looker and what is looked at make up one third of the film’s shots.6 Ince was an innovator and understood how to make people feel the story from the character’s viewpoint, by filming a character, his or her viewpoint, his or her reaction to this and then returning to his or her viewpoint. The increase in audience interest in stars encouraged directors to do this. Reverse angle editing (sometimes called “shot/reverse-shot pairs”) had become one of the most important techniques in mainstream filmmaking by the 1920s. Since then, every popular film in the history of Western cinema has used it.