British Avante Garde Films - Essay Example

British Avante Garde films 2008 In the early thirties, there was a very pessimistic attitude even among internationally known d film directors that the art of films does not match the English psyche. This cynical approach towards British cinema has, to some extent, been endorsed by British critics and scholars by showing an outward unwillingness to study the national cinema. Not more than twenty years back, British Cinema was portrayed as "an unknown cinema" by Alan Lovell and as "utterly amorphous, unclassified, unperceived" by Peter Wollen (as cited in Gyri, 2004). Even in 1986, Julian Petley indicated that the anti-realist effort of British cinema as a 'lost continent' that needed further examination and, as Chibnall and Murphy note in their Introduction of British Science Fiction Cinema (1999), this call for volunteers on a mission to hunt out the unusual and unnecessary (that is, films beyond realism) had been earlier overlooked . In spite of their seeming records for a status in a new anti-realist genre (including crime films and science fiction film), most of them were placed in the sunset world of lukewarm black and white B-movies. Such censures ultimately could stir the scholars and experts a bit and in recent times there is a sturdy growth in publications on British cinema although compared to the American scene the subject is still suffers from a relative lack of material. The tidy and wide contours the Hollywood cinema attained during the fifties and sixties and profited from the growth of film studies in the seventies. This is yet to be imitated in British cinema. Among the many revealing dealing of British film history Sarah Street's book British National Cinema (published in 1997). Street shows that "there is no such thing as a typical British film" (198). She , in this book has made a much more fascinating study by explaining the range in British movie making while revealing its evident historical trends - a study that could really snub those critics who always jeer at British cinema for not being "particularly interesting or worthy of study" (199). Here, she has traced the growth of the British Film industry, from the Lumiere brothers' first viewing in London in 1896, the manipulative power of Hollywood and the harsh financial disasters that affected British films. Sarah Street uses the ideas of 'official' and 'unofficial' cinema showing how British cinema has been both 'respectable' and 'disreputable' and eventually making us reveal why British cinema has constantly been treated indifferently by the authority and administration. Comparing Britain and Hollywood, Sarah asks what was the real historical and social function of the British 'star system'. "British films" are always films that have been produced in England rather than Scotland, Wales and Ireland, or to be even more exact films made in London and its outer suburbs. Another interesting point here is the way "British Cinema" clutches "British-ness", the historical, cultural, social and psychological factors, traditions and values that most frequently linked with the British identity involving the duty to rebuild the British cinematic image implying the national identity. British film industry had the same starts and novelties as its foils in Europe and America and that all through its history it was both part of a larger cinematic society and it had to deal with same challenges as other national film industries. The British cinema has a history as lengthy as the history of cinema itself. There are also directors in British cinema that can gloriously be entitled as "the inventor of cinema", the most remarkable among them being William Friese-Greene (1855 -1921), a portrait photographer turned film director, who, just like his French and American matching parts, was working for the creation of the cinematographic tools and is referred by many as the initiator in motion photography. He was a creator who conducted tests with moving image devices at the beginning of cinema that, after his death, was claimed by others. He started experimenting with color cinematography in 1898, becoming an intense competitor of G.A. Smith, the developer of Kinemacolor, who lived in the Brighton area where Friese-Greene had moved in 1905. Sadly because of legal problems he could gain much from his Biocolor system as against Kinemacolor that finally deposed the Biocolor system latter. His and another Englishman, namely Robert William Paul's experiments in Britain can be seen as examples that Britons were strongly committed in growth of cinema in the late nineteenth century (Friese-Greene, screenonline.org and Gyri, 2004). A little before the 1920's, shortly before the First World War to be precise, that film makers in Europe and America began to make longer story films, the so called "feature films", and the British cinema of the period also had a number of literary and dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare and Walter Scot. Cinema as a source of information and entertainment saw its tremendous growth potential by the mid 1910's. By the time World War outburst only 25% of the films screened in British cinemas were made in Britain with the rest coming largely from France - the main global producer - and America. The war changed the balance radically for America somewhat because in Europe, film production hot ruthlessly curbed during this time due to financial and political reasons. While the American share of the market was at "only" 30% in 1909, it had increased to 60% in 1914 and to an astounding 95% in 1926-- figures clearly showing the dominance American film for a British audience in the post-war period. The US entry into the war in April of 1917 supplied Hollywood with one of its major sources of plots - and profits, the British and other Europeans turning away from war pictures production owing to their huge cost for uniformed extras and colossal battle sequences. American did not miss the bus, as evidenced by the new sensational song of the time, George M. Cohan's Over There (1917): "Johnny get your gun, get your gun, get your gun, Johnny, show the "Hun" you're a son-of-a-gun, Hoist the flag and let her fly, Yankee Doodle do or die." The campaign films served by and large as conscription tools, and as arousing rants against the enemy, offensively hinting that heroic American participation would result in success and would 'make the world safe for democracy (War and Anti-War Films, filmsite.org ). The war gave rise to the star system in Hollywood and the films of Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks that British films had to contend against. The British cinema of the 1920s almost lived at the edge of a show business that was flourishing on the viewing of popular American films. Pioneers like Cecil Hepworth (1874-1953) carried on making films (e.g. Comin' Thro' the Rye - 1922) in his own way that appeared for all its carefully British character, obsolete and pass. His narrative style hardly changed from the early sappy, sentimental to the features of the 1920s, but it was a certain style that he intentionally promoted. He was excusably proud of his place in cinema history, and was appropriate to let the artist in his nature to triumph over the money making showman (http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/450004/). The end of the 1920's saw a group of new, younger producers such as Michael Balcon and Victor Saville and directors such as Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) and Anthony Asquith(1902-1968) indicating the future of British cinema. In British documentary films, the early 1930's witnessed important names like John Grierson (1898-1972), considered as the father of British and Canadian documentary films. Grierson's principles of documentary were that cinema's capability to watch life could be utilized in a new art where the "original" actor and "original" scene could function as better guides than the so-called feature films that depict a plot, a story libe and lots of histrioncs. Here, Grierson's views closely match with the Soviet propagandist Dziga Vertov's disrespect for dramatic fiction as "bourgeois excess". Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has earned certain recognition, though it presents philosophical questions about documentaries (hscreenonline.org.,.nfb.ca) . His 11 min, documentary (Granton Trawler) in 1934 about a trawler out fishing on Viking bank taught the up-and-coming directors how to explore movement visually. His work as a producer/creative contributor to Coal Face (dir. Alberto Cavalcanti 1935), written by W.H. Auden, that depicited the story of mining, which was then one of the main industries in the United Kingdom, showed what a real blend of talents can produce. The powerful Coal Face is obviously in the Griersonian 'creative interpretation of actuality' that inspired Cavalcanti's non- naturalist approach to true-life cinema as is evident in this visual and sound-wise tone- narrating the lives and work of coal miners. Nonetheless, with his concentration to the sensitive interface of sound and image, Coal Face represents what was to be Cavalcanti's characteristic artistic input to British cinema: a bond of realism and the ordinary on the one hand with a non-naturalistic, even sometimes surreal advance to fiction conversely. Cavalcanti initiated a genre of poetically-charged documentary realism, drama and surrealism and an disturbing intense, charged atmosphere in Went the Day Well, and even more so in his docu-feature film, Dead of Night, where a ventriloquist, held by his model, is led into murder Cavalcanti's British work, defied rigid divisions between art and amusement, However, Ian Aitken (2000) argues that he did not have the committed careerist's political know-how, and that in Britain he was pushed off creative path by the demands of form and the commercial film industry. He certainly appeared to have felt an outsider to British Studios, and certainly in artistic terms his input to British cinema does have an element of non-conformism in it. Yet he was clearly a noteworthy teacher to younger associates, and it is as a guide and as a producer he made a crucial influence (Cavalcanti ,http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/446878/). Despite this, the very existence of a British cinema was threatened by the American films which dominated British screens and the small number of producers and talented directors were unable to stop the decline in British production. Britain was not the only European country threatened by Hollywood and, Germany, for example, had introduced legislation to protect its industry and this example was taken up by many in Britain as a solution to the problems faced by British producers. Although Britain's cinema owners were not in favour of a legislation that would interfere with their rapidly expanding exhibition business the lobby for protection was considerable and the Cinematograph Films Act became law in 1927 obliging both renters and exhibitors distributors to include a specified quota of British films in their annual offerings to exhibitors, and requiring exhibitors to screen a specified quota of British films in their annual programmes. This act was the first case of the government intervening to protect the commercial film industry. Another documentary film maker albeit born in New Zealand, had been included in the British film history is Len Lye, his worldwide repute stands mainly on his attainments as a film-maker and kinetic sculptor (sculpture involving movement). He was drawn to modern art by for making "new forms", new imagery to "carry" the feelings of movement that could be found out in the body - a movement of a physical nature, not just a matter of image outlines. From his experience he was able to come near each art from an uncommon perspective angle, and so he turned up with radical ideas in the 1930s to make films without a camera ("direct films"), or using Technicolor to change footage into color outlines like those of modern painting. Lye was the initiator of many film techniques, including 'direct animation', the method of drawing and scratching designs straight onto film. He made his first animated film in 1929 and carried on experimenting with new techniques till the end of his life in 1980. He once wrote: "There has never been a great film unless it was created in the spirit of the experimental film-maker. All great films contribute something original in manner or treatment". In Trade Tattoo, Lye changed this footage in what has been depicted as the most complicated job of film printing and color grading ever tried. The film blends animated words and outlines with the live-action footage to produce images as multifarious and multi-layered like a Cubist painting. With its lively rhythms and Cuban music, the film (in Lye's words) conveys "a romanticism about the work of the everyday in all walks of life" (as cited in Free Radical, Harvard.edu). Although the documentary movement in Britain made a worldwide influence, the moral fibre of the films produced in the 1930's was symbolized by melodramas and so called 'escapist' films. Comedy films became popular in the period, varying from the actor-playwright-composer Nol Coward's (1899-1973) stylish adaptation to the popular series of farces such as Rookery Nook (1930). The theatre, in effect, supplied the elements for many films of the time and to become a important fashion in the comic film genre. The British crime film of the period also had its sources from the literary thriller and the detective story, the works of John Buchan and Edgar Wallace becoming the source of a vital and commanding cinematic tradition that carried on upholding the British cinema to the present, the key person, here, was Alfred Hitchcock especially with his "classic thriller sextet" that included films such as The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) now recognised as screen "classics" that facilitated Hitchcock's entry to Hollywood studios. Hichcock's migration to America shows well that British cinema was still living under the shades of its trans-Atlantic rival and the aspiration to grab the American audience was based upon creative as well as monetary necessities. The home market in Britain was too small to prop an industry making large budget films regularly and to earn in a foreign country became necessary if movies are to be extended beyond the low budget formula films. The success in the United States of Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) was pursued by a series of plentifully budgeted historical films The British film industry, , in spite of one-off successes failed to force an entry into the global market (Gyori , A Short History of British Cinema). Works Cited Gyori , Zsolt, A Short History of British Cinema, retrieved from http://ieas.arts.unideb.hu/materials/britishfilmea.doc Lovell, Alan The British cinema: The unknown cinema, British Film Institute, Education Dept, 1969 Steve, Chibnall & Murphy, Robert (eds), British Science Fiction Cinema, London and New York, Routledge, 1999 Street, Sarah, British National Cinema, Routledge , 1997 Friese-Greene, William, retrieved from http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/508948/ War and Anti-War Films, http://www.filmsite.org/warfilms.html http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/450004 Grierson, John, life, retrieved from http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/454202/ and http://www.nfb.ca/portraits/fiche.phpid=278&v=h&lg=en Aitken, Ian, Alberto Cavalcanti: Realism, Surrealism and National Cinemas Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000 Cavalcanti ,http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/446878/ Free Radical: The Films of Len Lye, retrieved from http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2007novedec/lye.html Read More