Popular Culture in the 20th Century: Early European Film

4 Early European Film

The huge set for the Babylonian sequences of Intolerance, released in 1916, was probably the most lavish yet constructed.

For much of the century's first decade, innovation in film production came more from Europe than the United States, where making movies was still seen as an offshoot of the more profitable business of making equipment.

In France Georges Melies exploited the cinema's capacity for illusion in a series of widely-copied science fiction and fantasy films such as Journey to the Moon (1902).

At the Gaumont studios Max Linder pioneered character clown achievements of silent cinema.

At the outbreak of war the firm of Nordisk of Copenhagen still dominated the German market absolutely. Then, at first, the Germans did exactly the same as the French--they sat back and waited. When the fighting settled down along more or less permanently established lines of trenches, a number of new firms were launched in the hope of making a lot of money. Sentimental and heroic films about nurses and soldiers were turned out by the score, but with the Iron Cross playing the part that the Légion d'honneur played in France. Nordisk, with a shrewd grasp of the situation, also began producing pictures about the defense of one's country and so forth, for the German market, and as this firm was by far the most powerful and best equipped, it quickly obliterated or absorbed all its competitors. The Union, one of the most important firms, eventually gave up the ghost, and by 1917 the only firms of any importance that remained were Nordisk and Decla-Bioscop.

These two houses, knowing exactly how successful the American serial films had become, made up their minds to do without imported movies just as they managed under the blockade to do without so many other things. Germany began to provide her own home-made serials and detective films, in which Mia May did duty for Pearl White, and all the other actors were carefully chosen so as to correspond to their American prototypes.

European innovation kept the American market open; until 1908, nearly half the films shown in New York were European imports, and the largest single producer of films shown in America was the French firm Pathe.

Using actors from the Comedie Français, the Film D'Art company introduced a subtler, less extravagant acting style to the screen. The overt a a higher art tradition was also important in the feature films - expensively produced multiple-reel costume dramas and Biblical epics, such as Cabiria - which were first produced in ltaly.

Since the Allies were producing patriotic films intended for exportation to neutral countries, like Marraines de Guerre, so Germany in 1917 founded B.U.F.A., which began by producing instructional films for the army, establishing five hundred cinemas on the Western Front and three hundred on the Eastern Front. It was at this moment that Krupp and the big banks chose to recognize the power of the motion picture: they formed a company known as Ufa with a capital of twenty-five million marks, and within almost no time this new firm, which flourished amazingly, had absorbed B.U.F.A., curtailed the success of Nordisk and-thanks to the munition makers--became one of Europe's most powerful industrial forces. At the Armistice there were only two companies of any importance left in Germany, Ufa and Bioscop.

In the interval, the German film developed quite independently in isolation. No foreign films were shown. The former favorites vanished, all save Henny Porten, Lotte Neumann and the exceptionally gifted Asta Nielsen. New figures came into prominence --Werner Krauss, Emil Jannings, Paul Wegener and Pola Negri. Wegener directed as well as acted; so did Richard Oswald, Eichberg and Lubitsch. Eichberg earned much praise for his Let There Be Light and Ferdinand Lassalle; Wegener for his romantic and Hoffmannesque Student of Prague, in which the German preoccupation with the macabre and fondness for occultism mixed with science are already evident. They were also evident in Nordisk Homunculus. As for Jannings, he made his screen debut in a Lubitsch film in 1915, then appeared in a version of Daudet Fromont Jr. and Risler Sr., directed by Robert Wiene in 1916. Next he was seen in Arthur Robison terrifying A Night of Horror and in Lubitsch Marriage of Louise Rohrbach ( 1917).

World War I drastically curtailed European production, and American distributors used this opportunity to secure a monopoly in their home market and expand their share of world business, by selling at other companies could not compete. By the end of 1918, in spite of war, famine and threatening revolution, a profound feeling for the film had been deeply implanted in Germany and already there was an originality about the German product which was to develop very fruitfully.

From then on through the twenties Hollywood provided not only the overwhelming majoýity of the world's movies, but also the stylistic model against which all other national cinemas - even those of lndia and Japan would define themselves. The French, Italian, German and British industries never regained their pre-war size.

4 Next Page: The movie is the art of the millions of American citizens