1900 - 1914 The Consumer Society Jump to:
1900 - 1914 The Consumer Society Jump to:
4 The movie is the art of the millions of American citizens
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"The movie is the art of the millions of American citizens," an English writer in the Adelphi discovered, "who are picturesquely called Hicks-the mighty stream of standardized humanity that flows through Main Street. . . . The cinema is, through and through, a democratic art; the only one." Nor would this commentator have had it otherwise. The attempt to educate the public to higher standards of taste except through the movies' natural evolution in response to a gradually maturing public sentiment was pious humbug. Europe had failed to realize the possibilities of the moving picture and was hiding behind that "singularly putrescent hypocrisy that masquerades as 'artistic culture.'"
The major figure in the rise of the American film, David Wark Griffith, did not want to make motion pictures. No contradiction proved more ironic for, in the entire history of the American screen, no other director achieved greater success, none won more esteem. This "enigmatic and somewhat tragic" figure, as Gilbert Seldes describes him, secretly cherished the ambition to become famous as an author and counted the moments until he should have sufficient money to quit the "flickers" and write. Ashamed of "selling his soul," he changed his name on entering the movies, only later to retrieve it and make it as familiar as the term "movie" itself.
Griffith further developed the art of Melies and Porter, contributing devices of his own that made for greater unity, clarity, and effectiveness. Sensing from the beginning, the need for a body of technique to catch and control the emotions of the spectator, he did more to realize a method and a viewpoint than any other man of his day. Although he was himself a former actor and playwright, he repudiated theatrical conventions and evolved a method of expression peculiar to the screen.
Griffith came to films at that propitious moment when they were in the plastic beginnings of artistic development. To them he brought new elements of form and a variety of resources, and added at least two great productions to American motion picture achievement. The most revered and influential movie creator of his day, and perhaps of all motion picture history, he justified the new medium to the world. His productions became models for directors wherever films were made, and to this day stand not only as important achievements in themselves but as the source of central motion picture developments.
Before 1910 the movies had discovered that sold cinema tickets; the earliest stars were stage actors like emme John Bunny or Billy Anderson, bilied in 1912 as "The Greatest Photoplay Star". But the greatest of Hollywood' s formative years were Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
From 1914 with Charlie Chaplin, achieved a unlike anything ever seen before them. More than the scale of their popularity, what made stardom a new phenomenon was that it detached fame from achievement in the strenuous life of work or battle. It was through Chaplin that the American film won its place in the sun, and Chaplin who continued to be its salvation, despite all the various financial maneuvers and all the bad films. The four war years, during which it was undergoing its real formation, produced that humble and joyous little figure who is the only universal hero of our times.
Readers of the fan magazines that began to appear in 1912 beeame as farniliar with their idols' off~screen lives as with their movie appearances. Chaplin's "little tramp" first appeared in 1914, and was an immediate suceess with audiences. But Charles Chaplin the actor behaved quite differently from Charlie the clown. Pickford and Fairbanks projected the same image on screen and off, and between them they offered their audiences new role models.
Fairbanks' comedies ridiculed Victorian restrictions on fun. In newspaper columns and books such as Laugh and Live and Make Life Worth-while, he advocated sport as a means of regenerating the urban masses. In His Picture in the Papers, made in 1916, Fairbanks played the rebellious son of a dour cereal manufacturer. He learned to box, becarne attractive to women, and rescued a big businessman from criminals.
Asked the secret of his strength, he advertised his father's cereal. Sales improved now it was associated with robust fun-Iovers.
Mary Piekford embodied the "new woman": healthy, robust, self-reliant, she eombined sexual aliure with chastity. "Little Mary", "Ameriea's Sweetheart", was more popular even than Chaplin. In 1916, she became the first star to be the producer of her own films. In them, she brought out the spontaneity and playfulness which Victorian culture had repressed in women.
Emancipated and even a suffragist, in her performances she questioned the female role in the familyand at work. When she married Fairbanks in 1920, the Hollywood mansion they boot, Pickfair, became famous as a paradise in which high-level consumption was advertised as the basis for a secure and stable family life.
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Chapters: 
King and Queen: Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the first King and Queen of Hollywood, taught America that success could best be expressed in the world of leisure.