Chapter 5 of a university course in media history by Prof. Bill Kovarik, based on the book Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2015).

1. Media History from
Gutenberg
to the Digital Age
Slides based on the Bloomsbury book by Bill Kovarik
Revolutions in
Communication
Chapter 5 – History of Cinema

2. Web site & textbook
Textbook:
1st edition – 2011 2nd edition – 2016
http://www.revolutionsincommunication.com

3.  Who invented movies
 Controversies and impacts
 Why did movies move to Hollywood?
 The silent film era
 What happened when sound arrived
 Golden age of film 1930s
 Film in War 1940s
 Film fights TV 1950s
This lecture is about …

4. How do we see cinema
history?
 A succession of inventions?
 An extension of theater?
 A shared social experience?
 A business? An art?
 A problem of regulation ? A means of
social control?
 A progression of camera, sound and
special effects techniques?
 All of the above?

5. Camera = “chamber”

6. Still projectors go back to
1650s

7. Early mechanical animation
A children’s
toy, also
called
Zoetrope
(US) and
Daedalum
(Britain).
It relied on
persistence
of vision to
create the
optical
illusion of
motion.

8. Eadweard Muybridge 1877
It started with a bet – Do all four hooves leave the ground when a
horse gallops? It’s hard to tell if you’re looking at the horse.
San Francisco photographer Muybridge was brought in by California
governor Leland Stanford in 1877 to settle the bet. He used trip wires
and glass plate photos.
The governor won, as you can see.

9. The elements are in place
 Camera / dark “chamber” (ancient)
 Projector with strong light (from
1600s)
 Mechanical animation (from late 1700)
 Flexible celluloid film (1880s)

10. Muybridge & Edison 1888

11. Edison develops peep show
Kinetoscope
system 1893
For individual
viewers
(note viewing port at the top)

12. Films made in the “Black
Maria”

13. Romance was an early theme
First kiss on film — 1896 -- May Irwin and John C. Rice staged
the first kiss ever seen on film for Thomas Edison in the film
studio called the “Black Maria” in Menlo Park, New Jersey in
1896. Edison’s short subjects were played on hand-cranked
personal projectors in Nickelodeon halls.

14. Kinetoscopes (not Nickelodeons)

15. Meanwhile in France…
Auguste and Louis
Lumière develop the
Cinématographe
system for theaters.
They were able to “get
the picture out of the
box.” 1895.

16. Auguste and Louis Lumière
“My brother, in
one night,
invented the
cinematographe”
-- Auguste

19. The first film director
Alice Guy-Blaché
directed and produced
hundreds of films
while working as the
head of production at
the Gaumont in Paris
1896 – 1907 and at
her own Solax studios
in New York 1910 –
1920s.Although neglected by historians, Guy-Blaché
originated techniques for narrative storytelling through
film. Overall, she produced more than 1,000 films in
her two-decade career. Only a few survive.

20. Nickelodeon
theater in
Toronto,
c. 1900

21. Early film was like theater
In George Méliès’s 1902 Trip to the Moon,
there are no closeups, few medium shots,
and only a few transitions from one scene to the next.
There was one
stationary camera
set in front
of the stage

22. Edwin S. Porter produced Great Train
Robbery 1903, Life of a Fireman …
Close-ups, location shots, moving
camera, time sequences
Directors begin to explore
the new medium…

23. Movie censorship 1908
Outrage follows. “This sort
of treatment can go in
Russia, but it can’t go in
this country,” one theater
owner responded.
Post card, UK, 1910
New York mayor
George McClellan Jr.
revokes the licenses of
540 “corrupt” movie
theaters.

24. Movie censorship 1910
The first African-American
heavyweight boxing champion, Jack
Johnson, won a July 1910 match,
He beat James Jeffries, a white boxer
called the “great white hope.”
A film showing Johnson’s victory led to
rioting in many US cities and at least
eight deaths.
The film alarmed racists in US
Congress who banned interstate
sales of all boxing films in 1912.
The ban wasn’t lifted until 1940.

25. Fathers of film: Eastman,
Edison
George Eastman (left) – Kodak camera and films founder -- and
Thomas Edison used patents to try to control the movie business.

26. MPPC – The Edison Trust
 Motion picture patents company
 Included US filmmakers Biograph and Vitagraph,
French filmmakers Méliès and Pathé.
 Wanted:
◦ 1 -- To keep independents from exhibiting in theaters or using
patents
◦ 2 – Censorship of immoral movies .
 Opposed by founders of Universal, Paramount and
Twentieth Century Fox studios
 Circumvention: They moved from the East coast
to Hollywood, where mild weather and distance
from the Edison company allowed feature film
expansion.

27. MPPC – The Edison Trust
 European films from Méliès and Pathé
ended with the outbreak of World War I in
1914.
 In 1915, independent producers won the
United States v. Motion Picture Patents
Company anti-trust case. Ended the Edison
monopoly on film patents
 Also 1915, Mutual Film v. Industrial
Commission of Ohio, Supreme Court rules
that films are not protected by the First
Amendment.

28. Independent studios moved to …

29. Silent film era
Freed from the
hobbles of Edison’s
monopoly, and with
competition from
European films now
halted by World War
I, US film makers
embarked on an era
of innovation and
development.

30. Birth of a nation – DW Griffith
1915
Nor really about US
history
Plot centers around
post-Civil War KKK
vigilante heroism
African Americans
depicted as
drunkards, rapists
and murderers
Riots broke out across US when film is shown – Performances had to
be shut down.

31. KKK Racism opposed

32. Sergei Eisenstein: Battleship Potemkin
1925
Brilliant
Soviet
director
finds that
cinema
has
its own
language
and logic
Montage: a compilation of close-ups, jump cuts
and relative motion, to convey symbolic meaning
or passage of time.

33. Chaplin: cinema super-star
Berlin, 1931 -- Frenzied crowds
surrounded the hotel and
besieged the train station…
• Left wing newspapers
celebrated working class genius.
• Conservative newspapers
said he should not be
so highly celebrated.
• Nazi papers were disgusted by
the “Jewish film clown.”
So now the political parties were defining
themselves in relation to the film star, not the
other way around.
Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 2008).

34. German expressionism 1922
Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari

35. Synchronized sound 1927
The Jazz Singer
Al Jolson
a major hit.
Although Jolson’s blackface
act is offensive by modern
standards, it was meant to be
clownish and sentimental at
the time, and had none of the
virulent racism of Birth of a
Nation.

36. ‘talkies’ had
wooden
dialogue
and
exaggerated
gestures
much like
the silent
films they
were
replacing.
https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=Y2ZU3TiVLUo
Esp. 28:00

37. Animation takes off
Walt Disney’s
synchronized sound
experiments were one
reason for his success
with Steamboat Willie,
1928.

38. Tearing up the sets
The Marx Brother’s first picture
Cocoanuts, shot in New York, 1929.
“Shot was just the word for it. All they
did was point the camera at us while
we ran through our old stage version.”
The director “laughed so hard he
drowned out everything else on the
sound track… (they) solved the
problem by having the director use
hand signals from inside a sound-proof
glass booth…”
Harpo Speaks

39. Widespread censorship
In France, “O de conduite” was
censored for violence. In the US,
the MPPA censored films and kept
Americans safe from romance, like
the 1933 Czech film Extase. An
official board of censors had to
approve UK each film.

40. Citizen Kane
Satirized life of
publisher William
Randolph Hearst
Produced 1941,
suppressed 1942,
revived 1960s
The RKO movie was directed by Orson Wells, a New York
theater director who had become famous for his “War of the
World” Mercury Theater Radio program broadcast in 1938.
In the American Film Institute’s top 100 movies of all time,
Kane is number one. It is a dark movie, full of cinema
technique but not geared to modern tastes.

41. Are artists responsible?
A glowing 1935
depiction of the Nazi
party celebrations in
Nuremberg Germany,
Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will is
considered a classic in
technique but a
monster for glorifying
the subject.
Here Riefenstahl and camera crew are getting a ground-level shot for
the 1935 film. Ten years later she would face charges at the
Nuremburg, and although never convicted of a crime, spent several
years in detention. She claimed that artists should not be held
responsible for the political problems their art causes.

42. Chaplin’s take on the Nazis
Chaplin’s moral courage in satirizing Hitler and defending Jewish
people should not be underestimated. Few people in 1940 would have
predicted the end of Nazi rule only five years later. Asked around that
time whether he was Jewish himself, Chaplin said: “I do not have
that honor. ”
The Great Dictator,
1940, used biting
sarcasm and
slapstick to attack
the cruelty of the
Nazi regime.

43. Hollywood studio system
 Paramount (1912), Columbia (1920),
Warner Brothers (1923), Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer (1924), RKO Pictures
(1928) and 20th- Century Fox (1935)
 Steady supply of films, stable
incomes, expertise
 Actors managed for benefit of studio
 Theater block booking (ends in 1948
with Paramount anti-trust suit).

44. Hollywood goes to war
Giving a damn
Clark Gable, famed for his role as
Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind,
became an officer in the Air Corps.
After narrowly escaping death in
combat, he made a documentary
called Combat America that featured
interviews with pilots and gunners.
Other significant films included
Frank Capra’s Why We Fight
series.
Also important: Mrs. Miniver (UK)
and Casablanca, the best loved film
in movie history.

45. Italian Neorealismo 1944–1950s
 National film movement
 Stories about the working class
 Filmed on location
 Non-professional actors.
 Rome Open City, Bicycle Thief,
Miracle in Milan
 Impact on French new wave, Polish
films, early ‘Bollywood’ productions

46. Documentary films
 Nanook of the North, 1922, about an
Inuk family in the Canadian Arctic
 Battle of the Somme, Geoffrey Malins
 Man with a Camera, Dziga Vertov,
1929

47. Documentary films 2
 The Undersea World of Jacques
Cousteau
◦ 1950s – 1980s
 Atomic Café, 1982
◦ About nuclear tests
 Gimme Shelter, 1970
◦ Rolling Stones disastrous
1969 tour
 Lots more
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_film

48. Post-war witch hunt
Blackballed writer
Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter who
was briefly a member of the
Communist Party, refused to
implicate other
Hollywood writers before the
House Un-American Activities
Committee and served an
11-month jail sentence. He was
blackballed (not allowed to
work) but brought back in the
late 1950s to work on films like
Spartacus and Exodus.

49. War reconciliation films
 WWI – Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir)
 WWII -- It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra)
 Vietnam -- Forrest Gump
 Cold War -- K-19, Hunt for Red October
 Berlin Wall -- Goodbye Lenin
Also racial reconciliation, 1950s – 70s
 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,
Lilies of the Field, Island in the Sun,
Little Big Man

50. Color barriers lower
One of the most important aspects of
cinema is its ability to humanize and
evoke empathy for people in other
walks of life, and nowhere did this
occur with as much significance as in
the evolution of images of African
Americans. By providing these insights,
Hollywood helped ease the way for the
US civil rights movement.

52. Competition from television
 Movie ticket sales in 1960 were only
half of what they were in 1947
 Producers reacted by showing things
that could not be seen on TV – more
sex, more violence, more social
commentary
 Hollywood also expanded into TV
production
 Hollywood revenues picked up again
to about ¾ of what they were at peak.

53. 60s films

54. 60s films
 TV competition let movies be
something more -- to both reflect and
lead a major shift in world culture,
away from patriotism and simple
heroics, toward tolerance,
introspection and personal growth.
 The era is often described as post-
classical cinema, characterized by the
undermining of cultural hubris and
devolution into artistic chaos.

55. 60s Blockbusters
 Epics: Lawrence of Arabia , Spartacus,
Magnificent 7, Guns of Navarone
 Musicals: Camelot, Sound of Music,
West Side Story
 Social: Psycho, Dr. Strangelove, the
Graduate, Easy Rider
 Comedy: Mary Poppins, Producers, Pink
Panther
 Westerns: Good, Bad & Ugly, Misfits
 Spy: James Bond

56. The evolving hero
 Sergeant York, (1941)
 From Here to Eternity (1953)
 Bridge over the River Kwai (57)
 Guns of Navarone (1961)
 Dr. Strangelove (1962)
 The Dirty Dozen (1967).
Moral ambiguity: In The Guns of Navarone,
Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck) says: “The only way to win a war is to be
just as nasty as the enemy. The one thing that worries me is we’re liable
to wake up one morning, and find we’re even nastier than they are.”
Sergeant York would never say that.

57. 70s Blockbusters
 Epics: Godfather, Jaws,
 Musicals: Grease, Fiddler on Roof
 Social: Cuckoo’s Nest, Catch 22, All
President’s Men
 Comedy: Rocky Horror, MASH, Monty
Python, Animal House
 Sci-Fi: Star Wars, Young
Frankenstein, Alien

59. 80s Blockbusters
 Epics: Princess Bride, Raiders Lost
Ark, Batman
 Social: Top Gun, Stand by Me,
Platoon, Amadeus, Gandhi, Brazil,
 Comedy: Tootsie, Coming to America,
Goonies
 Sci-Fi: ET, Back to Future, Field of
Dreams
 Musicals: Little Mermaid (Disney)

60. 90s Blockbusters
 Epics: Jurassic Park, Saving Pvt
Ryan, Bravehart, Mummy, Titanic
 Social: Forest Gump, Schindler’s list
 Comedy: Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction,
Big Liebowski
 Sci-Fi: Matrix, Terminator
 Musicals: Disney musicals (Mulan,
Beauty & Beast, Lion King)

61. 2000s Blockbusters
 Epics: Lord of Rings, Harry Potter,
Avitar, Gladiator, Pirates of the
Caribbean,
 Social: Remember the Titans,
Brokeback Mountain, V for Vendetta,
Inglorious Bastards
 Sci-Fi: Day after tomorrow, X-men
 Musicals: Almost famous, Frozen

62. Special effects
 Willis O’Brien
◦ Lost World, 1925;
◦ King Kong, 1933
 Fritz Lang
◦ Metropolis, 1927
 Ray Harryhausen
◦ Sinbad 1958; Gulliver 1960; Jason 1963.

63. Stop motion animation con’t
 Like musicals, which are now an
animation genre, stop motion is an
animation genre.
Nick Park – creator of Wallace & Gromit

64. Digital special effects
John Dykstra’s computer
controlled camera created
the new look of Star Wars
in 1977
But the big studios closed
special effects units
1970s, missing the digital
curve in the road until
1990s when they became
a huge part of the
medium.
Although digital effects are great, make a model first, says Jurasic
Park’s Denis Muren:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET5B68eV5DA

65. Effects wrap the medium
 Avatar 2009 shot almost entirely on a
sound stage with green-screens
 Zoe Salanda after digital effects (left)
and in motion-capture suit (right)

66. Digital revolution in delivery
 Declining cinema audience with TV,
cable, on demand home video
 Nicholas Negroponte, predicted in 1996
that the first entertainment industry to be
displaced by digital transmission
technologies would be the video rental
business. “And it will happen fast,” he
said. By 2010, video rental stores like
Hollywood Video, Blockbuster,
MovieStarz and others had filed for
bankruptcy.
 Cinemas now use 4K DCI pixel screens
instead of 35 mm film

67. International cinema 21st Century
 Hollywood now competing with films from
Asia and Europe
◦ Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
◦ Amelie, color-saturated French romance
◦ Lagaan, Indian film about poverty
◦ Spirited Away, Japanese anime;
◦ Slumdog Millionaire
 Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards,
Disney’s Frozen, created in many
languages to appeal to the growing
international audience

68. Bollywood:
The world’s leading cinema

69. Review: people
 Thomas Edison, George Eastman,
Auguste & Louis Lumiere, Alice Guy-
Blache, George Melies, D.W. Griffith,
Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers,
Orson Wells, Walt Disney, Leni
Riefenstahl, Frank Capra, Clark
Gable, Dalton Trumbo

70. Review
 Early film censorship, Edison Trust,
MPAA code, silent film era, “talkies,”
animation, Golden Age, Propaganda,
Citizen Kane, HUAC hearings, anti-
heroes, special effects blockbusters,
end of the mass audience

71. Next: Chapter 6
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