Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
or so features are no longer extant. Only a few sequences survive of North of Hudson
Bay, one of two Mix films under the direction of Fox's premier Western director at the
time, John Ford. Fortunately, several good examples of his work do remain. The Great K
& A Train Robbery ( 1926) gives a typical impression of Mix in his prime. It opens with a
spectacular stunt in which Tom slides down a cable to the bottom of a gorge, and ends,
after skirmishes on top of moving trains, with an epic first-fight in an underground cavern
between Tom and about a dozen villains. He captures them all.The Fox publicity machine
worked hard at constructing a biography which was as colourful as Mix's screen
performance. It was variously claimed that his mother was part-Cherokee, that he fought
with the army in Cuba during the Spanish - American War, taking part in the famous
charge up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, and also fought in the
Boxer Rebellion in Peking. None of these things was true. Mix did not leave the United
States during his brief army service, which ended ignominiously with his desertion when
he got married.By all accounts Mix often found it difficult to separate out fact from
faction. He followed the show-business tradition of Western heroes initiated by Buffalo
Bill Cody. Both on and off screen he became an increasingly flamboyant figure, with his
huge white hat, embroidered western suits, diamond-studded belts, and hand-tooled boots.
Though, unlike Hart, Mix had been a genuine working cowboy, his roots were in the Wild
West show and the rodeo, and at periodic points in his career he returned to touring in live
shows, including circuses. Mix's career was past its peak by the time sound came to the
Western, but the singing cowboys of the 1930s, with their fanciful costumes and Arcadian
vision of western ranch life, were his direct descendants, His last film, the serial The
Miracle Rider, was a rather sad affair. Five years later, short of money, he tried to
persuade Fox to finance a come-back. His old friend John Ford had to explain that the
picture business had passed him by. Later that year his car overturned at a bend outside
Florence, Arizona, killing him instantly.
Riders of the Purple Sage ( 1925)
EDWARD BUSCOMBE
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
Ranch Life in Great Southwest
( 1909); The Heart of Texas Ryan ( 1917); The Wilderness Trail ( 1919); Sky High
( 1922); Just Tony ( 1922); Tom Mix in Arabia ( 1922); Three Jumps Ahead ( 1923); The
Lone Star Ranger ( 1923); North of Hudson Bay ( 1923); Riders of the Purple Sage
( 1925); The Great K & A Trian Robbery ( 1926); Rider of Death Valley ( 1932)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brownlow, Kevin ( 1979), The War, the West and the Wilderness.
Mix, Paul E. ( 1972), The Life and Legend of Tom Mix.
THE SILENT FILM
Tricks and Animation
DONALD CRAFTON
Contrary to popular belief, the history of animation did not begin with Walt Disney's
sound film Steamboat Willie in 1928. Before then there was a popular tradition, a film
industry, and a vast number of films -- including nearly 100 of Disney's -- which pre-
dated the so-called classic studio period of the 1930s.
The general history of the animated film begins with the use of transient trick effects in
films around the turn of the century. As distinct genres emerged (Westerns, chase films,
etc.) during 1906-10, there appeared at the same time films made all or mostly by the
animation technique. Since most movies were a single reel, there was little programmatic
difference between the animated films and others. But as the multi-reel film trend
progressed after around 1912, with only a handful of exceptions, animated films retained
their one-reel-or-less length. At the same time they began to be associated in the
collective mind of producers and audiences with comic strips, primarily because they
adapted already-existing heroes from the popular printed media and 'signed' the films in
the cartoonists' names, although the artists generally had no involvement in the
production. Until the First World War, animation was a thoroughly international
phenomenon, but after about 1915 the producers in the United States dominated the world
market. Although there were many attempts at indigenous European production, the
1920s remained the dominion of the American character series: Mutt and Jeff, Koko the
Clown, Farmer Al Falfa, and Felix the Cat. Of all the ways in which the formation of the
animated film paralleled feature production, the most notable was the cartoon's
assimilation of the 'star system' in the 1920s, during which animation studios created
recurring protagonists who were analogous to human stars.
DEFINITIONS
The animated film can be broadly defined as a kind of motion picture made by arranging
drawings or objects in a manner that, when photographed and projected sequentially on
movie film, produces the illusion of controlled motion. In practice, however, definitions
of what constitutes animation are inflected by a variety of technical, generic, thematic,
and industrial considerations.
Technique
Animated images were being made long before cinematography was invented in the
1890s; as David Robinson ( 1991) has shown, making drawings move was a prototype for
making photographs move and has a history that diverges from that of cinema. If we
restrict our discussion to theatrical animated films, then 1898 is a possible starting-point.
Although there is no acceptable evidence to verify either claim, the animation technique
might have been discovered independently by J. Stuart Blackton in the United States and
by Arthur Melbourne-Cooper in England. Each claimed to have been first to exploit an
alternative way of using the motion picture camera: manipulating objects in the field of
vision and exposing only one or a few frames at a time in order to mimic the illusion of
motion created by ordinary cinematography. In projection, it makes no difference whether
the individual frames have been exposed 16-24 times per second or exposed with an
indefinite interval; the illusion of motion is the same. So the traditional technologically
based definition of animation as constructing and shooting frame by frame is clearly
inadequate. All movies are composed, exposed, and projected frame by frame (otherwise
the image would be blurred). The defining technical factor seems to be in the intended
effect to be produced on the screen.
Genre
It was not until about 1906 that the animated film became a recognizable mode of
production. Humorous Phases of Funny Faces ( Blackton, 1906) depicted an artist's hand
sketching caricatures which then moved their eyes and mouths. This was done by
exposing a couple of frames, erasing the chalk drawing, redrawing it slightly modified,
then exposing more frames. The impression was created that the drawings were moving
by themselves. Émile Cohl 's
Fantasmagorie
( 1908) also showed an artist's drawings
moving on their own, achieving independence from him. Gradually these conventions
were consolidated into characteristic themes and iconography which set this kind of film-
making apart from other novelty productions. Before about 1913, the items that were
animated tended to be objects -- toys, puppets, and cut-outs -- but slowly the proportion of
drawings to objects increased until, after 1915, 'animated cartoons', that is, drawings
(especially comic strips), were understood as constituting the genre.
Themes and conventions
Should animation be defined by characteristic themes? Some commentators have
identified 'creating the illusion of life' as animation's essential metaphor. Another
recurring motif is the representation of the animators (or their symbolic substitutes)
within the films. The confusion between the universe represented in the films and the
'real' world of the animator and the film audience is another persistent theme.
Animated films can also be defined culturally. It is often imagined that animation is a
humorous genre, aimed mainly at children, and indeed children have always been (and
continue to be) a large part of the audience for the cartoon film. But animation consists of
more than cartoons, and it should not be forgotten that even the classic cartoon was made
for general audiences, not a juvenile audience alone. A cultural definition of animation
would therefore need to take into account the kind of humour it represents but also its
association (particularly in the early period) with magic and the supernatural, and its
ability to function as a repository of psychological processes such as fantasy or infantile
regression.
Industry
Produced in specialized units (whether in studios or in artisanal workshops), animated
films soon came to have a particular place in the film programme. The cartoon was the
moment in the programme which foregrounded neither 'reality' (newsreel or
documentary) nor human drama (the feature), but humour, slapstick spectacle and
narrative, animal protagonists, and fantastic events, produced by drawings or puppets.
PRECURSORS
The 'trick film' was one of the earliest film genres. While identified primarily with the
work of the French magician turned film-maker Georges Méliès, many such films were
made in several countries between 1898 and 1908. During photography the camera would
be stopped, a change made (for example, a girl substituted for a skeleton), then
photography resumed.
A precursor of the animated film: a shot from Georges Méliès's 'trick film' The Man with the Rubber Head (
L'Homme à
la tête en caoutchouc,
1902)
Méliès himself apparently did not make extensive use of frame-by-frame animation. For
that one must turn to James Stuart Blackton, one of the founders of the Vitagraph
Company and maker of what is usually taken to be the first true animated cartoon,
Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. In 1906-7, Blackton made half a dozen films which
employed animated effects. His most influential was The Haunted Hotel ( February
1907), which was a smash hit in Europe, primarily because of its close-up animation of
tableware. Among film-makers profoundly influenced by Blackton's Vitagraph work were
Segundo de Chomón of Spain (working in France), Melbourne-Cooper and Walter R.
Booth ( England), and, in the United States, Edwin S. Porter at Edison and Billy Bitzer at
Biograph.
In these trick films animation was basically-a trick. Like the sleight of hand in a magic
film, the animated footage in these short films was a way to thrill, amuse, and incite the
curiosity of the spectators. As the novelty wore off, some producers -- notably Blackton
himself -abandoned this kind of film. Others expanded and modified it, leading to the
creation of the new autonomous film genre.
ARTISANS: COHL AND MCCAY
Émile Cohl had been a caricaturist and comic strip artist before discovering cinema
around the age of 50. From 1908 to 1910 he worked on at least seventy-five films for the
Gaumont Company, contributing animated footage to most of them. A rather obsessive
artist, Cohl quickly devised numerous animation procedures which remain fundamental,
such as illuminated animation stands with vertically mounted electrically driven cameras,