Classical Hollywood Cinema - Essay Example

This style of filmmaking is based on an invisible style, where the camera and sound recording merge as one with the action taking place on the screen. Classical Hollywood Cinema was formulaic in nature and most movies made were musicals, cartoons, slapstick comedy, Westerns, epics or the biopic. In 1927, with the release of the movie ‘The Jazz Singer’ sound was introduced to the moving picture. The movie was made by Warner Brothers, one of the big five studios of the time, the other four being Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Loews (MGM) and RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum).

These studios controlled filmmaking, from its creative to its financial and to its distributive process, which led to the creation of the classical film style. Movies were, “over determined,” a film jargon used to refer to the social, cultural and economic factors which determine the final product, and it was also derogatorily compared to Ford’s assembly line. The studio system solidified into a mammoth business undertaking prompted by the introduction of sound in films and the idea of vertical integration in its operations.

The studio system could be compared to a factory and as such the products coming out of it had a standard look and feel and it is this which led to the many genres in addition to the identification of studios with particular features. MGM had a list of stars on its roster and thus created all-star productions like ‘Grand Hotel’ (1932). Warner Brothers indulged in social realism while Paramount created rib tickling comedies and 20th Century Fox created very great musicals and biopics. The studio system became what has been called “the genius of the system’, the title of Thomas Shatz’s study of this unique industry, a phrase borrowed from Andre Bazin, a critic and theorist who called “American cinema … a classical art,