Classical Hollywood cinema
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Classical Hollywood cinema or the classical Hollywood narrative[1], are terms used in film history which designates both a visual and sound style for making motion pictures and a mode of production used in the American film industry between roughly the 1910s and the 1960s.
Classical style is fundamentally built on the principle of continuity editing or "invisible" style. That is, the camera and the sound recording should never call attention to themselves (as they might in a modernist or postmodernist work).
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[edit] The Golden Age
During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the end of the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s to the early 1960s, movies were issued from the Hollywood studios extremely fast. The start of the Golden Age was arguably when The Jazz Singer was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films. Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a formula—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio.
After The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, Warner Brothers gained huge success and was able to acquire their own string of movie theaters, after purchasing Stanley Theaters and First National Productions in 1928; MGM had also owned a string of theaters since forming in 1924, know through Loews Theaters, and the Fox film Corporation owned the Fox Theatre strings as well. Also, RKO, another company that owned theaters, had formed in 1928 from a merger between Keith-Orpheum Theaters and the Radio Corporation of America[3].
RKO formed in response to the monopoly Western Electric's ERPI had over sound in films as well, and began to use sound in films through their own method known as Photophone [5]. Paramount, who already acquired Balaban and Katz in 1926, would answer to the success of Warner Bros. and RKO, and buy a number of theaters in the late 1920s as well, before making their final purchase in 1929, through acquiring all the individual theaters belonging to the Cooperative Box Office, located in Detroit, and dominate the Detroit theaters.[4] For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films, Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. De Mille's films were almost all made at Paramount, director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth-Century Fox, etc.
Movie-making was still a business, however, and motion picture companies made money by operating under the studio system. The major studios kept thousands of people on salary—actors, producers, directors, writers, stunt men, craftspersons, and technicians. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across the nation, theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material. In 1930, MPDDA President Will Hays also founded the Hays (Production) Code, which followed censorship guidelines and went into effect after government threats of censorship expanded by 1930. [6] However the code was never enforced until 1934, after the new Catholic Church organization The Legion of Decency - appalled by Mae West's very successful sexual appearances in She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel [7]- threatened a boycott of motion pictures if it didn't go into effect [8], and those that didn't obtain a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration had to pay a $25,000 fine and could not profit in the theaters, as the MPDDA owned every theater in the country through the Big Five studios [9].
Throughout the 1930s, as well as most of the golden age, MGM dominated the film screen and had the top stars in Hollywood, and was also credited for creating the Hollywood star system altogether [10]; MGM stars included "King of Hollywood" Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper, Mary Pickford, Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Grace Kelly, Gene Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Gloria Stuart, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck, John Barrymore, Orson Welles, Audrey Hepburn, Buster Keaton and Judy Garland, [11]. Another great achievement of American cinema during this era came through Walt Disney's animation. In 1937, Disney created the most successful film of its time, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [12]. Also, in 1939, MGM would create what is still the most successful film, adjusted for box office inflation, Gone with the Wind [13]. Throughout the Golden Age of Hollywood, theaters were also controlled by the Big Five studios: MGM, Paramount, RKO, Warner Bros, and Twentieth Century Fox [14].
Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented film-making. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles and often regarded as the greatest film of all time, fits that description. In other cases, strong-willed directors like Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra battled the studios in order to achieve their artistic visions. The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939, which saw the release of such classics as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka, and Midnight. Among the other films from the Golden Age period that are now considered to be classics: Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, It Happened One Night, King Kong, Citizen Kane, Some Like It Hot, All About Eve, Duck Soup, Bringing Up Baby, North by Northwest, Dinner at Eight, Rebel Without a Cause, Double Indemnity, Mutiny on the Bounty, City Lights, Red River, Rear Window, Singin' in the Rain, My Man Godfrey, Top Hat, Roman Holiday, and Sabrina.
[edit] Style
The style of Classical Hollywood cinema, as elaborated by David Bordwell[2], has been heavily influenced by the ideas of the Renaissance and its resurgence of mankind as the focal point.
Thus, classical narration progresses always through psychological motivation, i.e. by the will of a human character and its struggle with obstacles towards a defined goal. The aspects of space and time are subordinated to the narrative element which is usually composed of two lines of action: A heterosexual romance intertwined with a more generic one such as business or, in the case of Alfred Hitchcock films, solving a crime.
Time in classical Hollywood is continuous, since non-linearity calls attention to the illusory workings of the medium. The only permissible manipulation of time in this format is the flashback. It is mostly used to introduce a memory sequence of a character, e.g. Casablanca.
Likewise, the treatment of space in classic Hollywood strives to overcome or conceal the two-dimensionality of film ("invisible style") and is strongly centered upon the human body. The majority of shots in a classical film focus on gestures or facial expressions (medium-long and medium shots). Andre Bazin once compared classical film to a photographed play in that the events seem to exist objectively and that cameras only give us the best view of the whole play[3].
This treatment of space consists of four main aspects: centering, balancing, frontality and depth. Persons or objects of significance are mostly in the center part of the picture frame and never out of focus. Balancing refers to the visual composition, i.e. characters are evenly distributed throughout the frame. The action is subtly addressed towards the spectator (frontality) and set, lighting (mostly three-point lighting) and costumes are designed to separate foreground from the background (depth).
[edit] Production
The mode of production came to be known as the Hollywood studio system and the star system, which standardized the way movies were produced. All film workers (actors, directors, etc.) were employees of a particular film studio. This resulted in a certain uniformity to film style: directors were encouraged to think of themselves as employees rather than artists, and hence auteurs did not flourish (although some directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles, fought against these restrictions).
[edit] Periodization
While the boundaries are vague, the Classical era is generally held to begin in 1927 with the release of The Jazz Singer. Hollywood classicism gradually declined with the collapse of the studio system, the advent of television, the growing popularity of auteurism among directors, and the increasing influence of foreign films and independent filmmaking.
The 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which outlawed the practice of block booking and the above-mentioned ownership and operation of theater chains by the major film studios (as it constituted anti-competitive and monopolistic trade practices) was seen as a major blow to the studio system, clearing the way for a growing number of independent producers (some of them the actors themselves) and studios to produce their film product free of major studio interference.
[edit] Further reading
- Bordwell, David; Staiger, Janet; Thompson, Kristin (1985). The Classical Hollywood Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-06055-6.
[edit] References
- ^ The Classic Hollywood Narrative Style at University of San Diego History Dept
- ^ Bordwell, David; Staiger, Janet; Thompson, Kristin (1985): The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. 1-59
- ^ Bordwell: 24
