Cinema 1913-1919

National Cinemas, Hollywood Classicism, and World War I (1913-1919)

 TERMS/PEOPLE

August Blom
Nordisk top director
1) The work of August Blom,
2) Nordisk’s top director of the early teens, typifies this style.
3)His most important film was Atlantis (August Blom, 1913)
4)at eight reels the longest Danish film to date.
5)The film offered a fairly conventional psychological melodrama,Sinking of Titanic?The following scene features a performance from Arthur Stross, "The Man Without Arms."

Autorenfilm
During 1913 - Autoreflim - "authors' film" Autorenfilm was publicized largely on the basis of a famous writer responsible for the script or the original literary work from which the film was adapted.The most successful and famous Autorenfilm was The Student of Prague) Paul Wegener used special effects to create scenes of the student and his double confronting each other.

Benjamin Christensen
One of the most daring and eccentric directors of the silent cinema also began working in the Danish Page industry. The Mysterious X (1913) His impressive debut as a director was The Mysterious X (1913), in which he also starred.4)It was a melodramatic story of spies and treason, shot in a bold visual style.5)Stark sidelighting and backlighting created silhouette effects; Gap of 4 years1)Christensen did not complete another film until the 1920s,when his Witchcraft through the Ages (1922) was financed by Svensk Filmindustri.6)By the war’s end, Denmark was no longer a significant force in international distribution.

Block Booking
PARAMOUNT was releasing about hundred features a year and requiring theaters to show all of them (with two programs per week) in order to get any. This was an early instance of block booking, a practice that was later repeatedly challenged as monopolistic

Carl Laemmle

Universal Film Manufacturing Company,
In 1912, independent producer Carl Laemmle

in 1915 he opened Universal City, a studio north of Hollywood,
   forming the basis of a complex that still exists.

Universal was moving toward vertical integration,
   combining production and distribution in the same firm.
By 1913, Laemmle had gained control of the new company, and in 1915 he opened Universal City, a studio north of Hollywood, forming the basis of a complex that still exists. By that point, Universal was moving toward vertical integration, combining production and distribution in the same firm.

1)The most influential film to include this technique was

2)Cecil B. De Mille’s The Cheat, utilized arc lamps derived from the theater.
The look of individual shots also changed. Most early films were shot using flat, overall light, from either the sun or artificial lights or a combination of both. During the mid-1910s, filmmakers experimented with effects lighting, lighting on part of the scene, motivated as coming from a specific source. The most influential film to include this technique was Cecil B. De Mille’s The Cheat, which utilized arc lamps derived from the theater. By the end of the 1910s and the early 1920s, large film studios boasted a great array of different types of lamps for every purpose. Light from a single, powerful spotlight offscreen left creates a dramatic silhouette on a translucent wall after the villain is shot in this scene from The Cheat.The Cheat (Cecil B. De Mille, 1915) Japanese ish

Charlie Chaplin
Chaplin, an English music-hall performer, became an international star with Keystone, going on to direct his own films at Essanay, Mutual, and First National over the course of the 1910s. 
Chaplin’s style was notable for his imaginative use of objects,
His dexterity led to many elaborately choreographed fights, chases, and mix-ups, such as the breakneck shenanigans Chaplin’s “Little Tramp,” with his bowler, cane, and oversized shoes, was soon one of the most widely recognized figures in the world. The Immigrant (Charlie Chaplin, 1917)

D.W. Griffith

1) In 1913, D. W. Griffith left the Biograph Company, where he had made over four hundred
   short films since 1908.
In 1913, D. W. Griffith left the Biograph Company, where he had made over four hundred short films since 1908. Biograph was reluctant to allow Griffith to make films longer than two reels. Despite the firm’s resistance, in the wake of the success of the Italian import Quo Vadis?, he completed a four-reel historical epic, Judith of Bethulia (1913). But it was his last film for Biograph.
During 1914,
1)Griffith made four feature films for Mutual,
2) Independently financed from various sources, the twelve-reel 

The Birth of a Nation told an epic tale of the American Civil War by centering on two families who befriend each
   other but are on opposite sides in the conflict. Reconstruction
7)Later scenes expanded Griffith’s technique of crosscutting for last-minute rescue
   situations.
The whole thing is a technical marvel with a singular vision from its director, producer, editor and screenwriter. 
Griffith spent over $110k or 2.5 million in today's dollars – 12 reels
Intolerance

1) In his next film, Griffith tried to outdo himself.
In his next film, Griffith tried to outdo himself. Intolerance, released in 1916, ran roughly three and a half hours.

Divas vs. Strongmen
A second distinctively Italian genre resulted from the rise of the star system. Several beautiful female stars became wildly popular. These were the divas (“goddesses”). 
The male equivalent of the diva was the strongman. The characters of Ursus in Quo Vadis? and Maciste in Cabiria started this trend. A muscular dockworker, Bartolomeo Pagano, played Maciste, who so fascinated audiences that Pagano went on to star in a series of Maciste films lasting into the 1920s. Unlike Cabiria, these and other strongman films were set in the present. 

Evgenii Bauer
RUSSIAN– came in 1912 - main director at the Khanzhonkov company
His mise-en-scène was characterized by deep, detailed sets
3) and an unusually strong sidelighting;
4) he also occasionally used complex tracking shots
The Dying Swan (1917)
Several of Bauer’s films carried the Russian love for melancholy to extremes, centering on morbid subject matter. 

Forest Holger-Madsen another -Nordisk director
Beautiful cityscape and strong backlighting
Life of an Evangelist (Forest Holger-Madsen, 1914)
 The narrative involves a frame story and lengthy flashback, as a preacher tells a young man about his time in prison as a result of being wrongfully convicted of murder. His tale saves the young man from a life of crime. The preacher’s dark, grim room, in which he relates his story, exemplifies the use of setting to create mood. An elaborate, realistic model of a cityscape, combined with strong backlighting, makes this scene in Life of an Evangelist unusual for its period.

Frock-Coat Films
Diva They typically starred in what are sometimes known as frock-coat films—stories of passion and intrigue in upper-middle-class and aristocratic settings. The situations were unrealistic and often tragic, usually featuring eroticism and death, and were initially influenced by the importation of Asta Nielsen’s German films

Giovanni Pastrone
Historical epics was followed in 1914 by one of the most internationally popular films of the era, Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria. Cabiria’s tracking shots were more influential, however, and the “Cabiria movement” became a common technique in films of the mid-1910s.

Lois Weber

1) One of America’s most prolific female directors, Lois Weber,
    came to prominence in the 1910s.
2) Having started in films in 1908 as an actress and scenarist, she was directing by 1911,
     often alongside her husband Phillips Smalley.
Few of their early films survive,
Weber went on to direct features on her own,
6)  mostly literary adaptations and films on social themes, notably The Blot (1921).
7) Like Tourneur, Weber gradually lost independent control of her work and directed only
    sporadically from 1923 to 1934.
8)When her career ended, she had directed well over a hundred films Shoes
Her masterpiece remains Shoes, a film about a shop girl named Eva Mayers as she fights against poverty, captured in her struggle to simply buy a new pair of shoes.Shoes (Lois Weber, 1916)

Louis Feuillade
The greatest filmmaker associated with serials was Louis Feuillade. 2)This prolific Gaumont director made around eighty short films a year between 1907 and 1913, working in various genres. “Fantômas” crime serial,

Maurice Tourneur
In 1914, Maurice Tourneur emigrated from France and became known as a distinctive filmmaker with a strong sense of pictorial beauty. he experimented with using modernist theatrical set design He also made some highly intelligent adaptations, including Victory (1919, from Joseph Conrad’s novel) and The Last of the Mohicans (1920, co-directed with Clarence Brown). 6)Here, Tourneur uses a tent opening to create a dynamic composition for a dramatic moment in The Last of the Mohicans.The Last of the Mohicans (1920, co-directed with Clarence Brown). The latter, often considered his finest film, fully displays Tourneur’s visual style, including his characteristic use of foreground shapes silhouetted against a landscape, often framed in a cave or doorway.

Mauritz Stiller - Svenska - went to Hollywood in 1925
Most of these were made by only three directors: Georg af Klercker, Mauritz Stiller, and Victor Sjöström.
So many of Mauritz Stiller’s early films are lost that it is difficult to judge his career
   before the mid-1910s.
Thomas Graal’s Best Film (Mauritz Stiller, 1917) had wit....woman overacting
Stiller’s most famous film was the antithesis of these comedies. A tragedy set in Renaissance-period Sweden, Sir Arne’s Treasure (1919) was adapted from a Lagerlöf story.The final scene shows the townspeople bearing her coffin across the ice as spring approaches

Paul Wegener
For decades, Wegener was to remain a major force in German filmmaking. The Student of Prague is a Faust-like story of a student who gives his mirror image to a demonic character in exchange for wealth. 

The fantasy elements of this film would become a prominent trait of German cinema, culminating in the German Expressionist movement of the 1920s. In following scene, exposure of separate portions of the same shot during filming allowed two characters, both played by Paul Wegener, to confront each other.

Serial
consisting largely of low-budget thrillers aimed at youthful matinee audiencesfrom the 1930s to the 1950s

3)Serial episodes can be seen as a kind of transitional form between the one-reel film and the feature.
The true serial carried a story line over all its episodes. Typically, each episode ended at a high point, with the main characters in danger. These cliffhangers (so called because characters often ended up suspended from cliffs or buildings) lured the spectator back for the next installment.

)Serials were usually action oriented, offering thrilling elements like master criminals, lost treasures, exotic locales, and daring rescues. Started in the US and France at same time In U.S. The adventures of kathly 1914 – Selig company starring Kathly Williams France The Perils of Pauline 1914Williams and White established the pattern of the serial queen, a heroine (often described as plucky) who survives numerous outlandish plots against her life The earliest American serial was The Adventures of Kathlyn (1914), made by the Selig company and starring Kathlyn Williams. Its episodes, set in India, were self-contained, but there was also an overall plotline. The same was true of The Perils of Pauline, made by Pathé in 1914. This hugely successful serial made a star of Pearl White and inspired other firms to make similar films. Williams and White established the pattern of the serial queen, a heroine (often described as plucky) who survives numerous outlandish plots against her life. The Perils of Pauline (Louis J. Gasnier, 1914)

Thomas H. Ince 
1)Is chiefly remembered for his success as an independent producer.
2)He made studio filmmaking more efficient by preparing detailed scripts
   that would control all phases of production.
3)What was called a “ continuity script ,” later known as a shooting script,
4)was a shot-by-shot description of the action,
5)with indications of costumes, settings, props, and sometimes lighting.

2)he made one of several pacifist features that appeared before America’s entry into the
   Great War.
3)Civilization (1916, codirected with two others) Civilization (Thomas H. Ince, 1916)

Victor Sjöström
 - Svenska to Hollywood in 1925
1)was one of the most important directors of the entire silent era. SWEDEN

2)His style was austere and naturalistic.
3)He used restrained acting and staged scenes in considerable depth,
   both in location shots and in sets.
4)His narratives frequently traced in great detail the grim consequences of a single action.

Sjöström

1)Landscapes are prominent in Sjöström's The Outlaw and His Wife (1917).

2)Again a single desperate action, the hero’s theft of a sheep to feed his family,
   affects his entire life.the fugitive hero (played by Sjöström) wanders in the vast countryside.

Yakov Protazanov
1) began directing in 1912,
2) and he worked mostly for Yermoliev.
3) Several of his main films of this period were prestigious adaptations
   from Pushkin and Tolstoy.
Russian ideal in acting; Mozhukhin
    a)tall and handsome,
    b)with hypnotic eyes,
    c)he cultivated a slow, fervent style.
 In the following scene, Protazanov uses:
    a) sidelighting and
    b) staging in depth
He starred in the title role of Protazanov’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel Father Sergius,