AMERICAN FILM IN THE SILENT ERA (1902Ð28) A most interesting early American film was The Great Train Robbery (1903), directed
by Edwin S. Porter of the Edison
Company. This early Western used much freer editing and camerawork than usual to tell its story. Influenced by both MŽlis and the British filmmakers, Porter had already made good use of the close-up, the dream vignette, and the moving camera (a pan to reveal a burning house) in The Life of an American Fireman (1903), but it was The Great Train Robbery that got the attention. After A Trip to the Moon, it was cinema''s second huge hit, and no other film touched its profit levels for the next ten years. When other companies (Vitagraph, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Lubin, and Kalem among them) began producing films that rivaled those of the Edison Company, Edison sued them for infringement of his patent rights. This so-called patents war lasted ten years (1898Ð1908), ending only when nine leading film companies (and several other entities) merged to form the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). From 1909, the MPPC attempted to control every aspect of the
industry. For example, only MPPC members could buy film from Eastman. Independent companies sprang up in opposition, buying film from England and France, evading Edison''s goon squads, and in some cases setting up shop in Hollywood. Declared an illegal trust in 1915, the MPPC was dissolved in 1917. Before 1905 motion pictures were usually shown in vaudeville houses as one act on the bill. After 1905 a growing number of small, storefront theaters, called nickelodeons, began to show motion pictures exclusively. By 1908 an estimated 10 million Americans were paying their nickels and dimes to see such films. Young speculators such as William Fox and Marcus Loew saw their theaters, which initially cost but $1,600 each, grow into enterprises worth $150,000 each, within five years. Called the "drama of the people," the early motion pictures attracted primarily working-class audiences. The popularity of the moving pictures led to the first attacks against it by crusading moralists, police, and politicians. Local censorship boards were established to eliminate objectionable material from films. In 1909 the infant U.S. film industry waged a counterattack by creating the first of many self-censorship boards, the National Board of Censorship (after 1916 called the National Board of Review), to set moral standards for films and save them from costly mutilation. A nickelodeon program lasted an hour and consisted of about six short films, usually including an adventure, a comedy, an informational film, a chase film, and a melodrama. The most accomplished maker of these films was Biograph''s D. W. Griffith, who almost single-handedly transformed both the art and the business of the motion picture. Griffith made over 400 short films between 1908 and 1913, in this period discovering or developing almost every major technique by which film manipulates time and space: the use of alternating close-ups, medium shots, and distant panoramas; the subtle control of rhythmic editing; the effective use of traveling shots, atmospheric lighting, narrative commentary, poetic detail, and visual symbolism; and the advantages of understated acting, at which his acting company, led by Lillian Gish, excelled. The culmination of Griffith''s work was The Birth of a Nation (1915), a mammoth (and racist) three-hour epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Its historical detail, suspense, and passionate conviction made the short film obsolete. In his next major film, Intolerance (1916), Griffith told four stories, set in four historical periods, at once. (The Soviets developed many of their theories of montage, or dynamic editing, from studying Intolerance.) In later films, such as Broken Blossoms (1919), The Greatest Question (1919), and Way Down East (1920), Griffith brought the melodrama to new levels of expressive power and a range tnded from the smallest intimate gesture to the structure of society to the meaning of life. No other filmmaker had such an influence on the art as Griffith, and most filmmakers are still following his instincts and working with variations of his techniques. The decade between 1908 and 1918 was one of the most important in the history of American film. The full-length feature film replaced the program of short films; World War I destroyed or restricted the film industries of Europe, promoting greater technical innovation, growth, and commercial stability in America; the film industry was consolidated with the founding of the first major studios in Hollywood (Fox, Paramount, and Universal); and the great American silent comedies were born. Mack Sennett became the driving force behind the Keystone Company in 1912; Hal Roach founded his comedy company in 1914; and by 1916, Charlie Chaplin had the best-known face in the world. During this period the first movie stars rose to fame. In 1918, America''s two favorite stars, Chaplin and Mary Pickford, each signed contracts for over $1 million. Other stars of this period and the 1920s included comedians Fatty Arbuckle and John Bunny, cowboy William S. Hart, matinee idols Rudolph Valentino and John Gilbert, the alluring Theda Bara, and the "It" Girl, Clara Bow. Along with the stars came the first movie fan magazines, beginning with Photoplay in 1912. The most popular of the early film serials, The Perils of Pauline, starring Pearl White, appeared in 1914. The next decade in American film history, 1918 to 1928, was a period of stabilization. Films were made within studio complexes, which were, in essence, factories designed to produce films in the same way that Henry Ford''s factories produced cars. Vertical integration, with film companies owning the theaters in which their films were shown, provided the commercial foundation of the film industry for the next 30 years. Two new producing companies founded during the decade were Warner Bros. (1923), which would rise with its early conversion to synchronized sound, and Metro (1915), which in 1924 became part of the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the producing arm of Loew''s, under the direction of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. In 1919, United Artists was founded by Chaplin, Griffith, Pickford, and her husband, actor Douglas Fairbanks, primarily as a distributing company. Attacks against immorality in films intensified during this Jazz Age decade. In 1921, after several nationally publicized sex and drug scandals, the industry headed off the threat of federal censorship by creating the office of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (now the Motion Picture Association of America), under the direction of exÐpostmaster general Will H. Hays. Hays circulated several lists of practices that were henceforth forbidden on the screen. Hollywood films of the 1920s became more polished, subtle, and skillful. It was the great age of comedy. Chaplin retained a hold on his world following with full-length features such as The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925); Harold Lloyd climbed his way to successÑand got the girlÑno matter how great the obstacles, in Never Weaken (1921) and The Freshman (1925); Buster Keaton remained deadpan through a succession of wildly bizarre sight gags in Sherlock, Jr. (1924) and The General (1927); and director Ernst Lubitsch, fresh from Germany, brought his "touch" to sexy, understated comedies of manners. The decade saw the United States''s first great Western (The Covered Wagon, 1923), horror film (The Phantom of the Opera, 1925, with Lon Chaney), gangster film (Underworld, 1927), and biblical epic (The Ten Commandments, 1923, by Cecil B. De Mille). Other great films of this era included Erich von Stroheim''s Greed (1924), King Vidor''s The Crowd (1928), Victor Sjšstršm''s The Wind (1928), and the first major documentary feature, Robert J. Flaherty''s Nanook of the North (1922). The most sig