Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction by Donna Kornhaber

Author:Donna Kornhaber [Kornhaber, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190852528
Google: o771DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Filmmakers

The issue of artistic oversight in the studio era touches on another, broader question of the cinema: the question of who gets to make films. One of the most distinctive aspects of the silent era compared to later periods in film history is the degree to which this question had so many answers, with artists from a kaleidoscope of backgrounds flocking to the nascent industry. In the cinema’s earliest years, the coterie of filmmakers was exceptionally eclectic. Many were artistic novices who happened to be connected to the manufacturers of motion picture equipment, like Guy-Blaché, a one-time secretary to photography magnate Léon Gaumont, or Edwin Porter, who was initially hired by the Edison Manufacturing Company as a mechanic. Others were fascinated by the illusionary potential of the medium, as with Méliès, a former stage magician, or George Albert Smith, who previously worked as a professional hypnotist.

The filmmakers of the cinema’s transitional era from around 1908 through much of the 1910s tended to come from the performing arts, though not invariably so. The pioneering director Lois Weber was a former concert pianist and singer, while Griffith and his most prominent predecessor at Biograph, the director Wallace McCutcheon Sr., both came from the theater. Yet Griffith’s protégé, Mack Sennett, who worked as an actor at Biograph before founding Keystone Pictures, had no background in the performing arts, having previously been employed at an iron works. Exceptionally few members of the film industry had any notable prior success before entering the fledgling field—a fact that was essentially acknowledged in those trends of the transitional period that sought to raise the cultural status of filmmaking by recruiting more elite practitioners, as with the film d’art movement in France and the Autorenfilm movement in Germany.

Even the era’s greatest stars came from a motley assortment of backgrounds. While some renowned stage actors made the occasional film during this period, such as the French icon Sarah Bernhardt or the American theatrical star James O’Neill, few achieved celebrity in the cinema. (John Barrymore was the rare exception.) Instead, that fate fell primarily to performers with little to no experience or training—like comedian Harold Lloyd, a one-time movie extra who lucked into leading roles—or those whose stage careers paled in comparison to their later film stardom, as with Mary Pickford, who had a brief career on Broadway in her youth.

The general openness to new talent that marked much of the silent era helps in part to explain one of the most remarkable phenomena of the period: the prevalence of female filmmakers across all levels of the industry and throughout the entirety of silent film’s development. One sees this meritocratic focus in the career of Guy-Blaché, who was not just the first female filmmaker in history but also one of the first narrative filmmakers anywhere in the world, with a career dating back to 1896. Her films were extraordinarily successful for Gaumont, and in a matter of years she rose to become the company’s head of production, eventually going on to found her own film studio in the United States.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.