A Short History of Film, Third Edition

A SHORT HISTORY OF

FILM

A SHORT HISTORY OF

FILM

THIRD EDITION

WHEELER WINSTON DIXON AND GWENDOLYN AUDREY FOSTER

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, NEWARK, AND CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Third Edition

ISBN 978-0-8135-9512-2 (pbk) ISBN 978-0-8135-9513-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8135-9514-6 (e-Pub) ISBN 978-0-8135-9515-3 (e-Pub) ISBN 978-0-8135-9516-0 (Web PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the second edition of A Short History of Film as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Dixon, Wheeler W., 1950–

A short history of film / Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8135-6055-7 9 pbk. : alk. Paper 0-ISBN 978-0-8135-6057-1 (e-book)

1.  Motion pictures-History.   2.  Motion Picture industry-History.

I.  Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey.   II.  Title

PN 1993.5.A1D53 2008

791.43′7—dc22

2007022097

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To the filmmakers,

historians,

and critics

of the twenty-first century

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Timeline 1832–2017

ONE

The Invention of the Movies

TWO

The Birth of an American Industry

THREE

World Cinema: The Silent Era

FOUR

The Hollywood Studio System in the 1930s and 1940s

FIVE

International Cinema through World War II

SIX

Postwar Challenges to the Movies

SEVEN

World Cinema in the 1950s

EIGHT

The 1960s Explosion

NINE

World Cinema 1970 to the Present

TEN

The New Hollywood

Photographs

Glossary of Film Terms

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Our first thanks go to Leslie Mitchner of Rutgers University Press for commissioning this volume and believing in it from the outset. We also give our deepest thanks to Dana Miller for a superb typing job; to Jerry Ohlinger for the many stills that grace this volume; to Michael Andersen for his assistance with the bibliography; to Dennis Coleman for help in research; to Virginia Clark for tirelessly checking facts and copyediting the first draft; to Eric Schramm for an excellent job of copyediting subsequent drafts; and to David Sterritt for a thorough and meticulous reading of the final text. We would also like to salute our many colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and its chair, Marco Abel, for his continuing support of our work.

For their many invaluable insights, we would like to thank our friends and companions over the years, too numerous to mention here, who first saw these films with us; the discussions we have had with our colleagues in film studies at other universities, as well as with our students, are surely reflected in this text as well. For this third edition of this volume, we also want to thank the many students and outside readers who enthusiastically read and critiqued the first two editions of this work. Finally, we thank the University of Nebraska Research Council for a Maude Hammond Fling Research Fellowship that aided us considerably in the completion of this book.

We wish to note that the material incorporated in this text on Dorothy Arzner, Jean Cocteau, Danièle Huillet, Jean Renoir, and Jean-Marie Straub, written by Wheeler Winston Dixon, originally appeared in The Encyclopedia of Film, edited by James Monaco and James Pallot (New York: Perigee/Putnam, 1991), provided by Baseline StudioSystems. The material on Chantal Akerman, Dorothy Arzner, Jacqueline Audry, Joy Batchelor, Kathryn Bigelow, Muriel Box, Vera Chytilová, Julie Dash, and Doris Dörrie, written by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, from Women Film Directors: An International Bio-Critical Dictionary, is reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut. This material has been significantly revised for its inclusion here.

TIMELINE

A SHORT HISTORY OF

FILM

ONE

THE INVENTION OF THE MOVIES

BEGINNINGS

Motion pictures don’t really move. The illusion of movement on the cinema screen is the result of persistence of vision, in which the human eye sees twenty-four images per second, each projected for 1/60th of a second, and merges those images together into fluid motion. But it took thousands of years to put this simple principle into practice, and the motion picture camera as we know it today is the result of experimentation and effort by many different inventors and artists, working in different countries throughout the world. The principle of persistence of vision was known as far back as ancient Egypt, but despite numerous experiments by Athanasius Kircher (whose 1646 text Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae described the use and construction of what we now know as the magic lantern), as well as contributions by the Chevalier Patrice D’Arcy and Sir Isaac Newton regarding the mechanics of the human eye, it was not until 1824 that Peter Mark Roget explained what the process entailed.

Roget believed that persistence of vision was caused by the retina’s ability to remember an image for a fraction of a second after it has been removed from the screen; later research demonstrated, however, that it was the brain’s inability to separate the rapidly changing individual images from each other that caused the phenomenon. Simply put, persistence of vision works because the brain is receiving too much information too rapidly to process accurately, and instead melds these discrete images into the illusion of motion.

The theory of stringing together still images to create this illusion of movement can also be seen in the early work of Claudius Ptolemy in 150 C.E. Al Hassan Ibn Al Haitham, a famous Muslim scientist and inventor who died in 1038, was one of the first to describe the workings of the camera obscura, in which an image from the world outside is captured through a peephole and projected on the wall of a darkened room (albeit upside down) as a real-life motion picture. There are also references in Lucretius to moving pictures circa 98–55 B.C.E., and one can find another early expression of the desire to create movement from still images in primitive cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and friezes decorating the walls of the Parthenon in ancient Greece. But at this early stage in the development of moving pictures, a practical device for creating the illusion of movement from a series of still images had yet to be developed.

As the centuries rolled on, magic lantern displays and shadow puppet plays in China, Java, France, and other nations of the world became popular entertainment. The puppet plays depended upon crude marionettes casting shadows on a translucent screen before the audience; image lantern presentations were essentially elaborate slide shows, in which a variety of glass plates were illuminated by candles and mirrors to cast images onto a projection screen. Dominique Séraphin’s famous Parisian Shadow plays entranced audiences from 1784 until 1870; and the Phenakistoscope, a moving wheel with mirrors and slits that allowed viewers to peek inside and see figures move, was renamed the Zoetrope and marketed as a novelty for the home viewer in the 1860s. During the same period, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg created the Eidophusikon, a special effects extravaganza that used miniatures illuminated by candlelight and oil lamps.

A Zoetrope in action; the figures inside seemed to move when the disc was rotated.

In addition, Ottomar Anschutz created the Electrical Tachyscope, which used a flickering light to illuminate a series of still photographs placed along the circumference of a rotating disk, much like the Zoetrope. He later developed this device into the Projecting Electrotachyscope, which projected these moving images on a screen. Phantom trains were also popular during this period, in which passengers would travel the world through the illusion of projected backdrops, while primitive hydraulic devices created the sensation of movement, much like today’s amusement rides at Universal Studios and Disneyland. As a sort of precursor to the big-budget cinema spectacles of the 1950s, Robert Barker’s Panorama, which played in Edinburgh in 1787, presented to audiences views of huge paintings that recreated famous historical tableaux. Such early magic lantern devices as the Chromatrope, Eidotrope, and Pieter van Musschenbroeck’s magic lantern used mechanical apparatus to shift the images in front of the audience’s eyes, creating the illusion of movement.

A sequence of action stills by Eadweard Muybridge; the beginnings of the modern motion picture.

Étienne-Jules Marey’s shotgun camera, first devised in 1882, and adapted for paper film in 1888.

Yet all these early gestures toward what would become the motion picture remained merely tantalizing hints of what might be accomplished until the late nineteenth century, when a series of inventions by a number of technicians and artists throughout the world brought the idea of moving pictures to primitive fruition. Perhaps the most famous progenitor of the cinema was Eadweard Muybridge, who created motion studies of cats, birds, horses, and the human figure in 1872, using a series of up to forty still cameras whose shutters were released by trip wires activated by Muybridge’s subjects.

THE FIRST MOVIES

Working in Palo Alto, California, Muybridge’s most celebrated experiment took place near the beginning of his career, when he was hired by Leland Stanford, then governor of California, to settle a bet as to whether or not a horse had all four legs in the air during a race or relied upon one leg on the ground at all times to keep balanced. In 1878, Muybridge used his trip-wire technique to produce a series of images of a galloping horse at a Palo Alto racetrack, decisively demonstrating that a horse did indeed have all four legs off the ground when running at a fast clip. By 1879, Muybridge was using his Zoöpraxiscope to project these brief segments of motion onto a screen for audiences; the average clip ran only a few seconds. This is the beginning of projected motion pictures, arising from a series of stills taken by a number of different cameras, run together rapidly to create the illusion of motion. Another cinematic pioneer, Étienne-Jules Marey, invented what might be considered the first truly portable moving picture camera in 1882, a machine-gun-styled affair that photographed twelve plates in rapid succession on one disc. In 1888, Marey switched to Eastman paper film instead of glass plates and was able to record forty images in one burst, using only one camera.

An early study of the human form by Eadweard Muybridge.

Perhaps the most mysterious figure of the era is Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, whose experiments in cinematography were revolutionary and remain controversial to this day. In Paris in 1887, Le Prince built a sixteen-lens camera, capable of photographing sixteen images in rapid succession of a single scene. By March or April of 1888, working in Leeds, England, Le Prince successfully created a single-lens camera that used a series of photographic plates to record motion, later replacing the plates with perforated paper film from the George Eastman company, as Marey had, for greater ease of projection. In October 1888, Le Prince photographed his brother Adolphe playing the melodeon (a primitive accordion) in the garden behind his laboratory.

In the same month, he photographed members of his family in the same garden at Oakwood Grange, strolling through the grass. In the summer of 1889 (although some historians say 1888), Le Prince photographed what would become his most famous sequence: a shot of pedestrians and traffic crossing Leeds Bridge. Twenty frames of this historic film survive today.

Le Prince was also working on a projection device for his images, and by the winter of 1889 he had perfected a projection device using the Maltese cross movement, a gear that pulled down the perforated film images one at a time for successive projection to create the smooth illusion of movement. In the first months of 1890, Le Prince photographed short films in Paris and screened them for the governing body of the Paris Opera. With his single-lens camera, his projection device, the use of the Maltese cross movement (still used in most film projectors and cameras to this day), and his groundbreaking public projection of his work, Le Prince seemed poised on the brink of success.

But then the inexplicable happened. After visiting his brother in Dijon in September 1890, Le Prince boarded a train bound for Paris intent on presenting his invention to the world. He never arrived at his destination. In one of cinema’s great mysteries, Le Prince seemingly vanished from the train before it arrived in Paris, along with his invention. Although a full-scale investigation was launched into Le Prince’s disappearance, no trace of the inventor or his devices was ever found. To this day, the riddle of what happened to Le Prince’s camera and projector remains a tantalizing enigma, and one can only speculate as to what history might have recorded of his accomplishments had he not disappeared without a trace.

Other inventors, certainly, were working along similar lines. William Friese-Greene, an Englishman, was also involved in creating an early version of the motion picture camera and projector, and is claimed by the British as the inventor of motion pictures. In that same country, Birt Acres produced and screened his films on a device he dubbed the Kineopticon, which was patented in May 1895 and publicly demonstrated in early 1896. Robert W. Paul was another early British film pioneer. In Germany, Max and Emil Skladanowsky invented their own cinema camera and projection system, the Bioscope, and in France, Henri Joly created the competing Photozoötrope.

In America, Woodville Latham and his sons, Gray and Otway, created the Panoptikon, yet another projection device, and introduced the Latham Loop, a device that allowed the film running through a projector a brief respite before being pulled down for projection, thus preventing the film from being ripped by the pull-down motion of the Maltese cross device. Thomas Armat and C. Francis Jenkins created the Phantoscope, which was then bought up by the inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Alva Edison, who renamed it the Vitascope, and later, with refinements, the Kinetoscope.

Four frames from the Lumière brothers’ brief comedy L’Arroseur arrosé (Tables Turned on the Gardener, 1895).

Thus, working at roughly the same time, William Friese-Greene, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, Gray and Otway Latham, Max and Emil Skladanowsky, and many other film pioneers all made significant contributions to the emerging medium. But despite all their work, two individuals, through a combination of skill and luck, stand out as the inventors of the cinema, although they were really just the most aggressive commercial popularizers of the new medium.

THE LUMIÈRE BROTHERS

The brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière are generally credited with making the first commercial breakthrough in combining the photographic and projection device into one machine in early 1895. Their camera/projector, the Cinematographe, was patented on 13 February 1895, and the first Lumière projections took place shortly thereafter, on 28 December 1895, in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris. The brothers presented, in such landmark films as La Sortie des usines Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory), L’Arroseur arrosé (Tables Turned on the Gardener, in which a gardener is watered with his own hose by a young prankster), and Repas de bébé (Feeding the Baby), a world that was at once realistic and tranquil, gently whimsical, and deeply privileged. In many respects, the Lumière brothers were the world’s first documentary filmmakers, and their short films (about one minute in length) remain invaluable as a slice of upper-middle-class French society at the turn of the century that would otherwise have been forgotten. One of the Lumières’ most famous early films was L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1895), in which a train pulls into a railroad station. Early patrons were so amazed that some are said to have fled the theater in fright, certain that the train would run them over. The Lumières made literally hundreds of these one-shot, one-scene films, and for several years continued to present them to an enthusiastic public captivated by the simple fact that the images moved. It was the first successful commercial exploitation of the medium.

Frames from the Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1896).

THOMAS EDISON

Of all the early film pioneers, it was Edison and his associates who most clearly saw the profit potential of the new medium. For the Lumière brothers, the cinema was but a curiosity; Louis had famously declared that the Cinematographe was an invention without a future. Edison, however, saw the chance to make real money. Even his early pieces, such as Blacksmith Scene (1893), Horse Shoeing (1893), and Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (better known as Fred Ott’s Sneeze, 1894), were deliberately staged rather than films of real events. In The Barber Shop and Sandow (both 1894), Edison designed hermetically sealed spaces to contain the human body and to draw the viewer’s attention to it. Sandow featured muscleman Eugen Sandow flexing his muscles for the gaze of Edison’s camera. Carmencita (1894) was a brief documentary of a Spanish dancer performing her sexually charged routine for the presumably male audience. Annabelle the Dancer (1895), featuring Annabelle Whitford Moore performing an energetic dance in a long flowing gown, was shown in the first public display of Edison’s Kinetoscopic films using Thomas Armat’s Vitascope projector. The film was hand-tinted in various colors and shown at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in New York City on 23 April 1896. Edison had intended his films to be peep-show entertainments, but he soon changed his mind as he saw the commercial potential of projected motion pictures. Now, with the Vitascope apparatus, he recycled his earlier films for public projection.

A filmstrip from Thomas A. Edison’s Sandow (1894).

In the earliest Edison films, there is no attempt to disguise the artificiality of the spectacle being created for and recorded by the camera. In all of Edison’s films, it is the body—at work, at play, or preening for the camera—that is the center of our attention, in contrast to the films of Auguste and Louis Lumière, which photographed life in a direct and unadorned fashion, with minimal staging. As late as 1898, Edison’s technicians were still using bare or simple black backgrounds to film Serpentine Dance and Sun Dance (both 1897,