Instructor: Walter Metz

Identity Politics and the Pre-Classical American Cinema: Race, Gender, Class

Today’s viewing and discussion will cover the period from the birth of cinema (1894) until 1916, the moment right before the solidification of the Classical Hollywood Cinema.

But first, we need to define "Classical Hollywood Cinema"

1. Classical refers to an art form that is proportional and harmonious. The case of classical music versus heavy metal will make the point: Mozart’s music is classical in this sense because it uses regular rhythmic patterns to efficiently produce an emotional response in the listener. Heavy metal uses dissonance and other forms of noise to produce disorientation in the listener.

2. Hollywood refers to a studio-system of filmmaking based in Southern California (most early cinema before the teens was produced in and around New York City) that developed in the teens, and was fully-functional by 1917. The incredibly efficient studio system of filmmaking remained virtually unchanged for 40 years, until a Supreme Court decision (the Paramount Decree of 1948) forced the studios to change the way they did business. Since it took about 10 years for full compliance to be achieved, the Classical period of American cinema is usually seen as having lasted from 1917-1959. After this, the so-called New Hollywood period, in which we are living, began (1960-present).

So, what does a Classical Hollywood film look like?                                                               

CLIP #1: The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941): Brigid O’Shaughnessy visits Sam Spade

Key terms

• Establishing shot
• Classical Breakdown of Space
• Shot/Reverse Shot
• 180 Degree Rule
• Eyeline Match (Glance-Object Cut)

Aren’t all films like this?  No! In the New Hollywood period, other ways of putting films together began to creep into our cinema, largely from European cinemas grounded in techniques of Modernism. It should be emphasized that most New Hollywood films remained classical in style. However, some films broke with the classical style and incorporated modernist techniques. For example, many films made during the Hollywood Renaissance (1967-1972) have modernist features.                                                                                                                                

CLIP #2: Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1968): Captain America rides his motorcycle

Key terms

• Modernism
• Jump cut

"Primitive" or Early Cinema

In traditional film histories, the period we are studying today (1894-1916) was referred to as the "primitive" period. The word primitive conjures up the idea that these early films were more basic and less interesting than the films we have today. Nothing could be further from the truth. Early cinema is filled with kinds of films that made perfect sense to their contemporary viewers, but make very little sense to us. Some early films asked quite a lot of their spectators in terms of prerequisite knowledge to follow the plot, whereas the classical films we know ask us to know very little as we begin watching. In a way, then, filmmaking in the classical style is more simplistic than the films of the early period. The reason this is important is that we need to know as historians that the kinds of films we see today are not natural, they had to be developed, and were developed according to particular cultural and social conventions. The kind of cinema we have today is not the only kind of cinema we could have. There are other kinds of cinema historically, and it is our job as historians to study their possibilities.

Let’s begin with an example of early cinema:

CLIP #3: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Edwin S. Porter, 1903, 14 min)

So, how do we get from the 1903 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a very unfamiliar looking film) to The Maltese Falcon (a classical film which seems quite familiar to modern viewers)? I will pursue the answer to this question using the four approaches to film history we studied in Lecture #1.

1. Technological Film History

At the birth of cinema, all of what we now as the movies had to be invented. For example, in the 1890s, many "films" were not made to be projected, but instead to be ran through a "peep show" device known as the Kinetoscope. Many of the films made at the Edison Company’s Black Maria studio were meant for its Kinetoscope. Projection quickly followed--the early films of the Lumieres in France were projected with their Cinematographe--but peep show films continued to be made into the first decade of the 20th Century.

Films were projected silent until the late 1920s, but almost always were accompanied by some sort of music, lecturing, or other audial component. Many significant sections of major early films were hand-tinted to give them color (the dance scenes in The Great Train Robbery (1902), the climax of The Birth of a Nation (1914)), but widespread mechanical coloring systems did not achieve prominence until the late 1930s with the Technicolor system. Even then, this system was withheld for major studio films, and did not become a commonplace feature of American cinema until the 1950s.

2. Institutional Film History

The Edison Film Company made Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This company, while famous for inventing the light bulb and the phonograph, is not one of the studios that makes films today. What happened to early film companies like Edison? Early filmmaking, because of the expensive sort of experimentation involved, was an incredibly unstable business. Companies formed and quickly went bankrupt or got swallowed up by bigger companies. In the first 15 years of cinema, the Edison company was the major player in America. In 1908, Edison conspired with the other major players (Biograph and Vitagraph) to form a monopoly (often just called "The Trust," its full name was the Motion Picture Patents Company). Independent film companies, including some of the companies that would later become the Hollywood studios, fought the MPPC in the courts. By 1917, the independents had won. This effectively killed off the Edison Company’s film business. By 1917, the Hollywood-based studios dominated the industry. By the 1930s, the major studios were: the "Big Four" (MGM, Paramount, Twentieth-Century Fox, Warner Bros. ), RKO, and the "Little Three" (Universal, United Artists, Columbia).

3. Aesthetic Film History

• Editing: The Development of the Continuity System:  Very early films consisted of one shot (a shot is one uninterrupted exposure of film stock). For example, The May-Irwin Kiss (Edison Co., 1894) consists of two people kissing. End of film. Subsequent films began to edit shots together. For example, The Finish of Brigit McKeen (Edison Co., Edwin S. Porter, 1901) consists of two shots: a shot of Brigit’s oven exploding and a shot of Brigit’s grave. The idea for this was based on comic strips, which feature the same sort of chronological presentation of narrative information.   Even after the discovery of editing, films made in the first few years of the 20th Century feature no editing within one scene. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a quite complex film, but there is no breakdown of space within one scene. This has its roots in the theater, where every scene change would require the breaking down of the set. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is very much like a play with 14 scene changes. In fact, the film is based not so much on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel as it is on George Aiken’s phenomenally successful 1852 stage adaptation.  Most film scholars cite the years betwen 1907 and 1909 as the moment when editing strategies became complex enough to begin to form the basic grammar of cinema as we know it. This includes first and foremost the development of editing within one scene. It also includes the development of the ability to render simultaneous actions. This is accomplished largely through parallel editing, the practice of alternating shots between one location and another. This technique is often attributed to D.W. Griffith’s innovations at Biograph.                                                  

Screening: The Lonely Villa (Biograph, D.W. Griffith, 1909, 10 min)

• Camera Distance:  Because there are few shots in early cinema, the distances between the characters and the camera tends to stay in long shot in order to capture all of the characters. Not until the early teens does the American cinema begin to capture the significance of the human face in close-up. By no accident, this is also the moment when actors begin to get recognized, and a star system begins to develop. Blanche Sweet, an actress in early Griffith films, becomes one of the early American film stars.

• Intertitles:  The development of early cinema can also be tracked by studying the increasing sophistication of intertitles. Very early films featured bulky intertitles that often proved repetitive and confusing. For example, in The Ex-Convict (1902), the intertitles tell us the plot of the shot we’re about to see. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) uses intertitles like chapters in the book, but do not help us piece together how these chapters relate to one another. However, by the teens, intertitles were being used almost exclusively to render dialogue comprehensible. By the late silent period (the 1920s, the so-called golden age of silent cinema), the most artistic films had done away with the need for intertitles at all.

• Film Length:  As my examples indicate, the length of films gradually increased over the first 20 years of cinema. From the 15 second May-Irwin Kiss in 1894 to early features in the early teens, we begin to arrive at the standard feature length (from 55 minutes to upwards of 3 hours).  This is not always the case (the 1903 Uncle Tom's Cabin is 14 minutes at a time when many other films were 2 or 3 minutes long).  However, the push toward feature length is the general trend.

Thus, by the teens, most of the basic grammar of film is in place. Consider how "modern" the 1914 film version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin seems in comparison to the 1903 version.                            

CLIP #4: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Minot Co., 1914, 45 min):  opening sequence

This brings us to the mid teens, and the development of feature-filmmaking in Hollywood. This will be the focus of the next lecture, wherein I will discuss A Florida Enchantment (1914), the film that we will screen next.

 4. Social Film History

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Race in early cinema
• The Lonely Villa: Class and Gender in early cinema
• The Lonely Villa: contradictory beliefs about technology’s use-value in turn-of-the century America.

Click here to return to the MTA 101 ("Film in America") Syllabus

This page was last updated on May 30, 2001

Questions or Comments?  Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to: metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman