AMERICAN DRAMA AND FILM

Submitted as a partial fulfilment of the internal assessment

on American Drama

Submitted to: Submitted by:

Prof. Ravishankar Rao Alfin Rosyidha
Department of English II MA in English

MANGALORE UNIVERSITY

2020
 AMERICAN DRAMA AND FILM

Drama or play is the form of composition designed for performance in the theatre, in
which actors take the roles of the characters, perform indicated actions, and utter the written
dialogue. American theatre is a relatively new tradition. It has produced a wide range of plays,
largely influenced by the diverse people inhabiting this nation. America is a witness of the
European immigration, so that with this predominance of the European settlers, American theatre
are greatly influenced by the European theatre. Therefore, American is the manifestation of
Shakespearean characteristics of play that it required a long time to discover its own shape and
identity as American drama.

As mentioned before, European drama which was to influence modern American drama
profoundly, matured in the last third of the 19 th century with the achievements of three
playwrights; those are Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Anton Chekhov. Ibsen was
profoundly influenced by psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. He carried outthe
subjects of the play such as guilt, sexuality, and mental illness. Furthermore, Strindberg brought
to his characterizations an unprecedented level of psychological complexity. Then, Chekhov
shifted the subject matter of the play from wildly theatrical displays of external action and
emotions to the concerns of everyday life. They presented the characters and situations in the
play more or less realistically, in what has been called the “slice-of-life” dramatic technique.

In 1916 and 1917, two small theatre groups, namely the Provincetown Players and the
Washington Square Players, began to produce a new American drama. Eugene O’Neil was one
of the American playwrights whose play was produced in that theatre. A serious discussion about
American drama is begun here. O’Neill is generally recognized as the first important figure in
American drama. O’Neill introduces realist and naturalist play to American theatre which was
associated to his predecessors; those are Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov. Realist drama is based
on the illusion that when we watch a play, the ‘fourth wall’ has been removeda mode of play
in the sense that the actors are able to communicate to the audience. Soon after the beginning of
the 20th century, realism became the dominant mode of American drama.

O’Neill appeared with the philosophical subject matter combining ancient Greek time
with Freudian psychoanalysis. It signifies the radical romantic departure to romantic convention
of the play as entertainment. Without particular tradition, history and cultural value of America,
O’Neill did not have something to guide him. He, therefore, revived many techniques within
which later becomes the principle of American drama; those are (1) the repetition of actions or
phrases to emphasize dramatic intent, (2) the use of symbolic masks or costumes, (3) the use of
archetypal themes from classical religion or mythology, and (4) the revival of the Elizabethan
devices of soliloquy (a speech made by one character onstage in which he talks to himself or
herself and reveals his/her thoughts without addressing a listener) and aside (a piece of dialogue
intended for the audience and supposedly not heard by the other characters onstage) to reveal a
character’s inner state.

The post-World War II brought two prominence figures in American drama; Arthur
Miller and Tennessee Williams. Miller and Williams represent the two principal movements in
modern American drama; those are realism, and realism combined with an attempt at something
more imaginative. Miller’s Death of Salesman (1949) is one of the successful example of the
realistic and imaginative fusion that presented not only the realistic play but also the impact of
the society on his characters’ lives. The action and the development of the characters depends not
only on the characters’ psychological makeup but also on the social, philosophical, and
economic atmosphere of their times. To an extent, William, as Miler’s contemporary, expanded
the concern of the play not only addressing the social matter but also the personal ones. He
probed the psychological complexities in his character such as Blanche in A Streetcar Named
Desire (1947). However, such psychological complexities showed within the characters are
sometimes reflecting our own complexities as the audiences. Williams’ writing is delicate and
sensuous, often colored with lush imagery and evocative rhythms.

American Film

The root of the historical view of American film is traced in the East Coast where Fort
Lee, New Jersey was the motion-picture capital of America. The industry started at the end of the
19th century with the construction of Black Maria, the first motion-picture studio in West
Orange, New Jersey, by Thomas Edison. The less expensive of the land as to compare with New
York resulted the phenomenal growth of the film industry at the turn of the 20th century. The
first recorded instance of photographs capturing and reproducing motion was a series of
photographs of a running horse by Eadweard Muybridge, which he took in Palo Alto, California
using a set of still cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's accomplishment led inventors
everywhere to attempt to make similar devices. In the United States, Thomas Edison was among
the first to produce such a device, the kinetoscope.

After all, talking about American film, we cannot separate the discussion from
Hollywood. Hollywood is a neighborhood in the central region of Los Angeles, California. Its
name has been associated with it the development of the U.S. film industry. Many of its studios
such as Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and Universal Pictures were founded there.
Hollywood was incorporated as a municipality in 1903. It was consolidated with the city of Los
Angeles in 1910, soon thereafter a prominent film industry established, and eventually becoming
the most recognizable in the world.

In early 1910, director D. W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west
coast with his acting troupe. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in
downtown Los Angeles. While there, the company decided to explore new territories, traveling
several miles north to Hollywood. After hearing about Griffith's success in Hollywood, in 1913,
many movie-makers headed to the west in order to avoid the fees imposed by Thomas Edison,
who owned patents on the movie-making process. In 1911, David and William Horsley built the
first studio in Hollywood namely Nestor Studios of Bayonne, New Jersey, later merged with
Universal Studios. William Horsley's other company, Hollywood Film Laboratory, is now the
oldest existing company in Hollywood, now called the Hollywood Digital Laboratory. By 1912,
major motion-picture companies had set up production near or in Los Angeles. Across the years
and century, Hollywood has come to dominate the way of thinking of filmmakers and the
audiences all over the world. It has succeeded in selling America to the world wherein America
is seen as a utopian society that is free from of errors.

References
 Henderson, Archibald. “The American Drama.”• The Sewanee Review, vol. 23, no. 4, 1915, pp. 468-478. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/27532847. Accessed 3 Sept. 2020.
 Ibbi, Andrew Ali. “Hollywood, The American Image and The Global Film Industry.” Cinej Cinema Journal, vol.
3.1, 2013. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/208855671.pdf. Accessed 3 Sept. 2020.
 “Cinema of the United State”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_the_United_States. Accessed 3 Sept.
2020.
 “Unit 1 American Drama: An Introduction” http://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22813/1/Unit-
1.pdf. Accessed 3 Sept. 2020.
 “The History of American Drama”. https://sites.google.com/site/english3gk/home/literature/the-colonial-
period/the-crucible/the-history-of-american-drama. Accessed 3 Sept. 2020.