Alyssa Heimrich Film History I Essay Exam; Question 1&3

There were many significant men in the late 1800s that influenced the film industry, and what it had been up to the 1930s. In 1889, George Eastman perfected and manufactured a process of nitro cellulose base on rolls that were transparent, thin, strong and standard in quality, what we know today, as film. Also around this time, Thomas Edison invited Eadweard Muybridge to West Orange lab to demonstrate Muybridges Zoetrope device. W.K.L. Dickson invented the motion picture camera Kinetograph (motion writer) and Kinetoscope (motion viewer). Edison had also built a studio which he dubbed, The Black Maria. It was all black, and rotated to stay with the sun. Dickson also invented American Perforation which allowed film to run smoothly in cameras and projection. Finally, Thomas Aremt, who worked for Edison, had constructed the Latham Loop. This, allowed film to stop momentarily at the gate. Founded in December 1908, the Motion Pictures Patents Company was a deal made among the major American film companies (Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, Kalem, American Path, and Melies), George Kleine, the leading film distributor, and Eastman Kodak, the biggest supplier of raw film stock. The MPPC terminated the domination of foreign films on American screens. It standardized how films were distributed and exhibited in America, and improved the quality of American motion pictures with internal competition. As silent films were successful in the early 1900s many auteur directors sought and experimented with a fairly new phenomenon for the time; sound. Of course with new experiments come new problems. Microphones were immobile, thus sets had to be created

around the microphones and the actors could seldom move around while talking. Also, the quality was not the best. Economically, sound brought major change in the film industry as a business. New needs included sound stages, theatres wired for sound, stage directors, actors who could speak well and remember lines, and of course, writers. Financially it revived the film industry as well. In 1929, Paramount had earned $15million vs. $8 million, Warners earned $17million vs. $2million, and Fox eared $9million vs. $5million. Also by this time, the studio system, which consisted of the Big 5 studios, (Warner Bros, Paramount, RKO, MGM, and Fox) The term studio system refers to the practice of large motion picture studios producing movies primarily on their own filmmaking lots with creative personnel under often long-term contract and . They were also pursuing vertical integration through ownership or effective control of distributors and movie theaters, guaranteeing additional sales of films through manipulative booking techniques. The basically made a deal with theaters so that they would play their A-films as well as their B-films as a package so that the companies could make more money; also known as Block Booking. In 1933 The Catholic Legion of Decency wrote the Production Code. It was a code of means that which productions had to follow or they would not be approved and played in theaters. Of many instructions, womens roles were to be more respectable, and there could not be cursing or vulgarity in anyway. It changed the role of women in a huge way. Women went from being and object of/portraying sex, to exuding power.

D.W. Griffith greatly impacted the industry with his complex storytelling. He believed film could make people think and feel. He thought of the shot as the unit of film, not so much the scene. Because of Griffith, Film became what the director wanted the audience to see. He was the first Auteur filmmaker (wrote, directed, edited, scored). His films included many heavy moral messages which dated back to his Victorian influences. For example, in The Birth of a Nation, there are heavy handed subtitles, and allegorical names, such as Dear One, and Brute Force. Charlie Chaplin portrayed his social views with comedy and used entertainment to make a point he wanted to develop a character and created The Tramp. The character was used repeatedly and represents the little fellow, outsider, underdog. The Tramp yearns for acceptability, love, money, respect. He is clumsy and quirky but he has a kind and generous heart. Chaplin used this character in many films to portray many controversial themes such as, drug addiction, alcoholism, poverty, hunger, crime and religious hypocrisy. In his most famous film Gold Rush, Chaplin plays his Tramp, and uses comedy to show the audience the hardships of life as a minor trekking to Alaska in search of gold in the 1800s. In one example his comic relief never fails as his character is starving and tries to eat his shoe. John Fords endearing view of society is strongly directed in his film Stagecoach. The film is very profound with its many themes among characters. They include different social classes in a small setting, sexual & social prejudice, greed, alcoholism/shame, redemption, and revenge. In his films he used visual images, rather than a lot of talk. For example in Stagecoach, the frontier is metaphor for the American spirit and evil was either nature or people.

Victor Flemings direction of Margaret Mitchells, Gone with The Wind, exemplifies how meaningful the film was to him. An article in Time Magazine read, On Fleming's largely underappreciated work in Gone With the Wind, which he took over from George Cukor halfway through shooting: "Most accounts of Gone With the Wind focus on everything [producer David O.] Selznick did before Fleming arrived ... but rewrites continued during filming, and as [F. Scott] Fitzgerald wrote of Fleming for a 1939 lecture tour by [Sheilah] Graham: '[He was a] fine adaptable mechanism which in the morning could direct the action of two thousand extras, and in the afternoon decided on the colors of the buttons of Clark Gable's coat and the shadows on Vivien Leigh's neck ... Like all pictures, it had been a community enterprise ... but the tensile strength of this great effort has been furnished by the director.