Jaakko Seppälä
The Heyday of the Silents, Sound Cinema
& Avant-Garde http://www.helsinki.fi/taitu/tet/Jaakko/WorldFilmHistory1.html

• In the 20s Wall Street became interested in Hollywood
• Hollywood studios were making more money than ever before (80 million tickets a week in USA in 1928)
• The silent cinema reached a peak of splendour
• The big budget film with eye catching production values appeared in the twenties
• The boundaries between illusionistic, theatrical and
real were blurring
• Realist illusion as the dominant aesthetic

• In the silent years most studio era genres emerged
• The films of the silent period can be categorised under two main modes, the comic and the
melodramatic (Nowell-Smith)
• A broadly melodramatic approach to both character and plot prevailed in the twenties in action films and in those purporting to be more psychological in intent
• Comedy came in two types: the slapstick tradition and the society comedy

• The classical Hollywood style emerged in the 1910s
• In the 1920s the style was polished
• The Three-point-lighting (artificial studio lighting)
• The Soft focus cinematography (created with filters)
• In the late twenties the panchromatic film stock replaced the orthochromatic film stock
• The star system (the star as a commodity)
• To what extent Hollywood movies influenced the style of European cinemas?

• The early 1920s saw a series of Hollywood scandals
• “Hollywood films promote decadence” -arguments
• There was an increasing pressure for a national film censorship law
• In 1922 studios formed a trade organisation The
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
• Will Hays (the head of MPPDA) guided studios to produce inoffensive entertainment
• Self censorship instead of national censorship

• Hollywood dominated the world film market
• Buying European filmmaking talents ensured that no national cinema could not compete with Hollywood
• Hollywood (with 15000 American film theatres) was too great for any one country to compete with
• In 1924 European film industries began to cooperate and to distribute each other’s films
• Continental films instead of national films
• Synchronised sound, depression and new political attitudes ended the pan European movement

• Thomas Edison attempted to synchronise the sound and the image already in the 1890s
• Hollywood was doing good business in the 1920s
• Why invest in the new uncertain technology?
• Small studios Warner Bros. and Fox Film saw the sound film as an opportunity to make good money
• Two competing sound systems: The Vitaphone (soundon-disc) and The Movietone (sound-on-film)
• “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”
• The Jazz Singer premiered 6 October 1927

• Audiences chose inferior sound films over high quality silent films (initially the sound was an attraction)
• Silent films were mocked and ridiculed
• Many stars lost their careers because of their accents and others came to be seen as relics of the bygone era
• Some made a successful transition to sound
• The early sound technology was inflexible and film aesthetics took several steps back
• Slapstick comedy died, musicals emerged, scriptwriters assumed a new importance

• Avant-garde is an aesthetically and politically motivated attack on traditional art and its values
• This is truly an independent cinema
• Remains marginal to the commercial cinema
• First avant-garde films were made in the 1910s but this cinema really began to flourish in the 1920s
• Avant-gardes of the 1920s: abstract animation, dadarelated cinema, surrealism, cinéma pur, lyrical documentaries and experimental narrative