Alessia Belsito-Riera

Matt Gonzales

2-3 pm

Before the Golden Age of the Silver Screen

The humble beginnings of cinema made no allusion to its future grandeur, for once it found its footing in the late 1800s, moving pictures soared to an unimaginable fame. The Daguerreotype (1836) and photograph were not enough, inventors sought motion. There were a variety of instruments used to mimic motion, but it wasn't until 1877 with French Inventor, Charles Emile Reynaud's Praxinoscope, that motion was finally harnessed. This device projected a series of images onto a screen, and by playing them rapidly in succession, they gave the illusion of movement.

Later, Frenchmen Etienne-Jules Marey, and Luis LePrince perfected this crude invention by enabling the images to be taken on one plate rather then on separate pieces of film. Like many of the great inventions of the time, Thomas Edison (and Dickson), takes the credit for making the first motor-powered camera, causing the motion picture industry to sky-rocket in the 1890s. The revolutionary principles of this “camera” are still used today.

After years of refining the tool dubbed the Kinetograph, the first Production House “Black Maria” was set up on the Edison Laboratory Grounds. Various shorts were produced in the studio, mostly documentary style and non-fiction. On April 19^th 1894 the Holland Brothers opened the first Kinetscope Parlor in New York, commercially exhibiting “movies” for the first time. The Founding Fathers of Modern Film, Luis and Auguste Lumiere, patented the Cinematographe in 1895, changing the film industry for good. “Thus Cinema was born on December 28^th 1895, in Paris, when the Lumiere brothers' presented the first commercial and public exhibition of a projected motion picture to a paying public in the world's first movie theatre” (Source 1). This experience was groundbreaking. Never before had such magic entered the lives of the crowd. Experience and its representation, what writers had so long tried to depict, was now possible. Mass Media acquired a whole new meaning, the world became smaller, simpler, and all the more fascinating. People began to see the world through different eyes; the mundane became fantastic, and the possibilities of representation endless. In 1902, Gorges Melies broadcasted the film Le Voyage Dans La Lune, signaling the beginning of the use of special effects, studios, plots, story-lines, character development, cinematic tricks, and editing techniques.

After this movie, fictionalized films began to emerge like The Great Train Robbery (1903), along with blockbuster, pop culture films. By the 1900s, films became a leisure and pass time, that even working and middle class citizens could enjoy. As their popularity grew, so did their theaters, their audience, their production houses, and the filmmaking process. Full length feature films began to emerge by the 1910s: The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), followed by L'Enfant Prodigue (1907), and in the U.S. Dante's Inferno (1911) and Oliver Twist (1912). The Pioneer of Modern Filmmaking, D.W. Griffith soon entered the scene, revolutionizing the method of narration by essentially creating modern and avant-guarde filmmaking. He engineered the concept of camera mobility, flashbacks, split screens, and many other (now standard) filmmaking techniques. In 1915, Griffith went on to make his epic, landmark film: the controversial yet incredibly revolutionary, The Birth of a Nation. Despite its major contribution to Cinema, it re-kindled the popularity of the KKK, incited dissidence, and unearthed hidden racism, showing just how influential and powerful filmmaking had become in society. This also became one of the first “blockbusters,” a film to generate a large revenue, and one of the first films to bring “fame” to world of Cinema. Seeing the profit to be made in the Film industry, Big Business Owners began to capitalize the industry. By the 1920s, Production Studios moved from the East Coast to Sunny Hollywood, California due to optimal weather conditions for outdoor shooting, and various political reasons. Here the studios known as “The Big Five” (Warner Bros., Paramount, MGM, RKO, and 20^th Century Fox) and “The Little Three” (Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) still in control today, set their foundations, installing Cinema as a solid industry and cultural facet that would contribute to the Golden State's wealth, and popularity. Actors and Directors such as Charlie Chaplin in The Kid (1921) and Buster Keaton in The General (1926) began to make their mark through both comedy and drama, moving the industry from creating merely entertainment to creating relevant and influential commentaries on social and cultural matters.

Cinema began to explore Politics, Social, and Cultural movements, deepening its influence on Society. Already by 1915, Cinema had discovered the wonders of Technicolor, but in 1927, the world and the film industry was struck by the most powerful tool yet: sound. Al Jolsen in The Jazz Singer, inaugurated the first “talkie.” Sound had successfully entered the world of cinema, opening a world of possibilities that would change the industry for good, economically, politically, and socially. Due to the new influx of revenue in the Hollywood Hills, extravagant, glamorous culture began to diffuse throughout the industry, founding magnificent theaters such as Grauman's Theater, creating movies that every person had seen not only across America, but across the world (The Gold Rush, The Jazz Singer, Wings, The Big Parade), and birthing Celebrities and Stars (Great Garbo, Harold Lloyd, Tom Mix). Film increasingly began to make its way into the lives of the average American, becoming a leisure rather than a luxury, and paving the foundations of pop/mass culture. Film could represent a reality through illusion. Movies could transcend the sanctity of experience, bringing one person's exact vision into the eyes of an entire population or even world. Such was the influence of the new media, that writers of the Modernist era, such as Dos Passos, became increasingly fascinated with its ability to represent experience, to represent reality through illusion, to transcend social class, race, both the real and the fake. And so Cinema began to capture the attention of the world, uniting the human race in the endless fascination of what was the magic of the Silver Screen as it paved its way down the red carpet to its Golden Age.

Discussion:

1. How do the basic principles of film connect with the essential Modernist Themes?
2. Why do you think Modernist Authors were so fascinated by Cinema?

Works Cited:

Dirks, Tom. "Film History Before 1920."Film History Before 1920. AMC Filmcite, Web. 12 Oct. 2016. <http://www.filmsite.org/pre20sintro.html>.Parts 1-5

Dirks, Tom. "Film History of the 1920s."Film History of the 1920s. AMC Filmcite, Web. 12 Oct. 2016. <http://www.filmsite.org/20sintro3.html>.Parts 1-4

@edictive. "Influence of Film on Modern Society."Edictive On Filmmaking. Edictive Blog, 07 July 2013. Web. 12 Oct. 2016. <http://edictive.com/blog/influence-of-film-on-modern-society/>