Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
the shoddiest material. 'To see, in these early films, Garbo breathe life into an impossible
part', comment Durgnat and Kobal ( 1965), 'is like watching a swan skim the surface of a
pond of schmaltz.'
MGM, having seen the careers of European-accented stars like Negri ruined by sound,
nervously delayed Garbo's first talkie. Anna Christie ( 1930), a pedestrian version of
O'Neill, showed they had no cause for concern. Her voice was deep, vibrant, and
melancholy, her accent exotic but musical. With her status assured as Metro's top female
star, the legend began to grow: the asceticism, the shyness, the reclusiveness. 'I vahnt to
be alone', he image and the woman were hard to disentangle - which made her all the
more fascinating.Costume dramas figured largely in Garbo's 1930s films, not always to
advantage. 'A great actress', wrote Graham Greene, reviewing Conquest ( 1937), 'but what
dull pompous films they make for her.' Here as elsewhere the austerity of her acting was
smothered in period fustian and stilted dialogue, the direction entrusted to sound
journeymen like Brown (who also handled the remade Anna Karenina, 1935). Cukor's
Camille ( 1936) was an improvement, with Garbo heartbreaking in her doomed gaiety, but
in Mamoulian's Queen Christina ( 1933) she gave the performance of her career,
passionate and sexually ambiguous - and, in the final scene, hugging her grief to her like a
concealed dagger.The mystery of Garbo, the haunting aloofness and sense of inner pain,
had made her (and still make her) the object of cult adoration. MGM, as if puzzled what
to do with this enigma, decided she should be funny. ' Garbo laughs!' they announced for
Ninotchka ( 1939), apparently never having noticed the full-throated abandonment of her
laugh before. Acclaimed at the time, the film now looks contrived and, for Lubitsch,
surprisingly' heavy-handed. Two-Faced Woman ( 1941), an attempt at screwball comedy,
was a catastrophe. Garbo announced a temporary retirement from filmmaking - which
became permanent. From time to time, even as late as 1980, come-backs were mooted -
Dorian Gray for Albert Lewin, La Duchesse de Langeais for Ophuls but never
materialized. A legendary recluse, she retreated into inviolable privacy - confirmed in her
status as the greatest of movie starts, because the most unattainable. The woman and the
myth had become indissolubly merged. PHILIP KEMPSELECT FILMOGRAPHY Gösta
Berlings saga ('The Atonement of Gösta Berling) ( 1924); Die freudlose Gasse ( Joyless
Street) ( 1925); Flesh and the Devil ( 1926); Love ( Anna Karenina) ( 1927); A Woman of
Affairs ( 1928); The Kiss ( 1929); Anna Christie ( 1930); Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise
(The Rise of Helga) ( 1931); Mata Hari ( 1932); Grand Hotel ( 1932); As You Desire Me (
1932); Queen Christina ( 1933); The Painted Veil ( 1934); Anna Karenina ( 1935);
Camille ( 1936); Conquest ( Marie Walevska) ( 1937); Ninotchka ( 1939); TwoFaced
Woman ( 1941)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Durgnat, Raymond, and Kobal, John ( 1965), Greta Garbo.
Greene, Graham ( 1972), The Pleasure-Dome.
Haining, Peter ( 1990), The Legend of Garbo.
Walker, Alexander ( 1980), Greta Garbo: A Portrait.
The Heyday of the Silents
GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH
By the middle of the 1920s the cinema had reached a peak of splendour which in certain
respects it would never again surpass. It is true that there was not synchronized sound, nor
Technicolor, except at a very experimental stage. Synchronized sound was to be
introduced at the end of the decade, while Technicolor came into use only in the mid
1930s and beyond. Nor, except in isolated cases like Abel Gance's Napoléon ( 1927), was
there anything approaching the wide screen that audiences were to be accustomed to from
the 1950s onwards. It is also the case that viewing conditions in many parts of the world,
particularly in rural areas, remained makeshift and primitive.
But there were many compensations. Audiences in cities throughout the developed world
were treated to a spectacle which only twenty years earlier would have been
unimaginable. In the absence of on-screen sound there were orchestras and sound effects.
Film stocks using panchromatic emulsion on a nitrate base produced images of great
clarity and detail enhanced by tinting and toning. Flicker effect had been eliminated, and
screens up to 24 X 18 feet in size showed images brightly and without distortion, large
enough to give physical embodiment to the grand scale of the action.
Many of these qualities were to be lost with the coming of sound. Live music disappeared
from all but a handful of auditoriums. Tinting and toning effects were abandoned because
the colour on the film interfered with the sensors for reading the sound-track. The focus of
investment moved from visual effects to the problems of sound recording and, on the
exhibition side, to the installation of playback equipment. Sound also encouraged a loss of
scale, as emphasis shifted to the kind of scenes that could be shot with dialogue. The
spectacular qualities that had distinguished many silent films were reduced as the new
dialogue pictures took over, with musicals as the only significant exception.
The scale of the action projected into the large spaces which film-makers designed films
to be seen in was perhaps the most striking feature of the silent cinema in its heyday.
There was grandeur and a larger-than-life quality both in the panoramic long shots
incorporating landscapes, battles, or orgies, and in the close-ups magnifying details of an
object or a face. It was rare for a film to miss out on opportunities to aggrandize its
subject, whether this was the conquest of the West or life on a collective farm. The houses
of the rich tended to be mansions and those of the poor teeming tenements. Heroes and
heroines were beautiful, villains ugly, and dramatic values were projected on to the bodies
of the performers, enhanced by effects of shot scale and camera angle.
For this concatenation of effect to be achieved, many techniques had to be developed and
made concordant with each other. Film-makers proceeded blindly, with little to guide
them in the way of either precedent or theory. They did not exactly know what effects
they wanted, nor, to the extent that they knew, did they all want exactly the same effects.
As a result there were many experiments-in technology, in dramaturgy, in narrative, in set
design -- some of which proved to have no sequel. A number of distinct styles developed,
notably in Hollywood, but also in Germany, France, the Soviet Union, India, Japan, and
elsewhere. On the whole it was American -- ' Hollywood' -- styles which provided at least
a partial model for film-making throughout the world, but German models were also
influential, even in America, while the Russian 'montage' style was more admired than
imitated.
The style developed in America from about 1912 onwards and consolidated throughout
the silent period has sometimes been called 'classical', to distinguish it on the one hand
from the 'primitive' style which preceded it and on the other hand from other, less
consolidated styles which cropped up elsewhere and on the whole had less historical
success. Although it allowed for effects on a large scale, it was straightforward in the way
effects were marshalled. It was above all a narrative style, designed to let a story unfold in
front of the audience, and it organized its other effects under the banner of narrative
entertainment. Underlying this style, however, were other deepseated characteristics,
including a more generalized 'realistic-illusionist' aesthetic, developed in the industrial
context which increasingly determined the practice of film-making and viewing in the age
of the silent feature.
INDUSTRY
The key to the spectacular development of the silent cinema (and to its rapid transition to
sound at the end of the 1920s) lay in its industrial organization. This was not an incidental
characteristic-as maintained for example by writer, film-maker, and (twice) French
Minister of Culture André Malraux, who once airily described the cinema as being 'par
ailleurs' ('furthermore') an industry. Rather, the potential for industrial development was
built into the cinema from the very beginning, both through its intrinsic dependence on
technology (camera, film stock, projector) and through its emergence in the early period
as, literally, 'show business'. The early cinema should not really be dignified with the
name of industry. It was a ramshackle business, conducted on a small scale, using
equipment and technology which (with the exception of the film stock itself) could be put
together in an artisanal workshop. But as films became more elaborate, and the level of
investment necessary to make them and ensure their distribution increased, so the cinema
came to acquire a genuinely industrial character-in the scale of its operations, in its forms
of organization, and in its dependence on capital.
The definitive industrialization of cinema was not achieved until the coming of sound at
the end of the 1920s, which consummated its integration into the world of finance capital
and its links (via the electric companies) to music recording and radio. But already in the
years after the end of the First World War the cinema had acquired its character as a
prototype of what has since come to be called a culture industry. Like radio and music
recording it was technological by definition, but unlike them it was not just a technology
used to transmit a preexisting content. The content itself was created by means of the
technology. Having been technologically created, films then also had to be distributed to
places where a related technology could be used for showing them. The quantity of
investment, the time scale over which it was deployed, and the need to match supply and
demand imposed on the cinema not only industrial organization at the point of production,
but related business practice at every level. Films were produced for the market, and
operations designed to manage market demands had a great influence on film production.
This was to have unprecedented consequences for every aspect of the medium.
THE STUDIO
Films were produced in studios. Although the American film companies had moved to
southern California in the 1910s partly for the sake of the abundant sunlight and the
variety of locations, by the 1920s a majority of scenes had come to be shot in artificial
settings, either indoors under electric light or outdoors on constructed sets. Film-makers
ventured on to locations only for scenes (or single shots) which could not be simulated in
the studio. Studio shooting not only gave more control of filming conditions, it was also
more economical. The twin needs of economy and control also gave rise to simplified
methods of constructing sets and ever more sophisticated ways of putting shots and
scenes together with the aid of special effects of one kind or another.
Although in common parlance the term special effects is generally reserved for techniques
which simulate fantastic events, many of the same techniques were in practice more often
used for the portrayal of realistic scenesas an easier and cheaper way of shooting them
than if the scene had to be reproduced in actual real settings. The enormous expense of
constructing the actual-size sets for the Babylonian sequence of Griffith's Intolerance
( 1916) spurred film companies to research simpler ways of making it appear as if the
action was taking place in actual three-dimensional space. Within a scene studio shots (for
example close-ups) would be matched to location shots, while a single shot could be
composed of heterogeneous elements carefully merged to look as if it represented a single
reality. A simple device was to paint part of a scene on a glass plate, with the action being
shot through the clear portion of the glass. But there were also more complicated
techniques, such as the one devised by the German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan in
the mid-1920s and used, among other films, on Fritz Lang's Metropolis ( 1927). This
involved constructing miniature sets which were located to the side of the action to be
filmed. A partially scraped mirror was then placed in front of the camera, at an angle of
forty-five degrees. The action was shot through the scraped part of the mirror, while the
sets were reflected through the unscraped part. Alternatively part of the scene could be
obscured by a matte, and inserted into the shot later in the laboratory. Or a background
(shot on location by a second film unit) could be projected on a screen at the back of the
studio, while the characters performed in front of it, though this did not come into
widespread use until the early sound period, when dialogues needed to be recorded in
studio conditions.
The effect of these developments in studio production techniques was to push the cinema
of the late silent period more and more in the direction of realistic illusion, blurring the
boundaries between the obviously illusionistic (the films of Georges Méliès for example),
the theatrical, and the unquestionably real. Fiction films aspired to a reality effect whether
their content was realistic events or fantastic and implausible ones. Only at the margins