Hollywood Cinema as a Model of Commercial Cinema - Essay Example

 Films and Filming Cinema is an art that developed from man’s incorrigible wish to record the movement and the moving objects. Because it was the moving and not static objects that interested him. So the first film show, the Lumier Show was just a shot of a train coming into the railway platform. The viewers were not sure whether what they were seeing on the screen was real or myth. They were afraid the train would come forward towards them and hence many were reported to have sat back on their chairs scared. This make-belief quality is the charm of cinema. On one side cinema is documenting reality, the reality of the train coming to the platform, here in the Lumier show. On the other hand cinema is making the viewer believe that the train coming towards him is real, making the unreal look real. These two qualities of Cinema led to the division of cinema into documentaries and feature films. Of these the feature films or story telling films developed into the commercial cinema or the mainstream cinema. The revolt against the commercialization of the art of cinema led to the emergence of the experimental cinema. Side by side with these the documentary cinema existed as one of the greatest traditions of cinema. This paper examines Hollywood Cinema as a model of Commercial cinema or the main stream cinema. The French New wave film movement, with Jean Luc Godard and his film Breathless will be analyzed as an example for the experimental cinema. HOLLYWOOD: Hollywood, in Los Angeles, California is all about stars and glitter. The area now known as Hollywood was sparsely populated in the seventeenth century when the Spanish explorers entered there .Santa Monica Mountains towered over the area and in the canyons of these mountains lived the Native Americans. By 1870s the area was a flourishing agricultural area, with crops like hay and grain, bananas and pine apple. In 1910, film maker D.W. Griffith working for Biograph Company, came to Downtown Los Angeles, and with his acting troop to shoot films. Thus it was Griffith who shot the first ever movie in Hollywood, then without a studio. The film was called “In Old California”. It was a Biograph melodrama. The movie troop stayed there for several months before going back to New York. The oldest company, still existing in Hollywood is Nester and Centaur Films based in Gower Gulch and founded by William Horsley. Nester Company started the first film studio in Hollywood in 1911.The studio functioned from an old tavern on the corner of Sunset and Gower. It was from here the early Hollywood legends like D. W. Griffith, (the director credited with the evolution of the film language, through his classics like “The Birth of a Nation’, “intolerance”), and Cecil B.Demille, known for his biblical epics, regularly started making films. It was in 1914, that the first feature film called “The Squaw Man” was produced in Hollywood. All the earlier films produced there were ‘short films’. “The Squaw Man” marked the starting of the modern Hollywood film industry. After this, many milestone films of world cinema were made in Hollywood. They included “Birth of a Nation” (1915) by D.W. Griffith, “ Nanook of the North”, ( 1922 ) the classical documentary on the life of Eskimos, by Robert Flaherty, classical comedies by Charlie Chaplin , Buster Keaton , Harold Lloyd, the cartoon films of Walt Disney , all film genres from Wild west to horror films , romances and mysteries. By the end of the World War 1, (1914 -18) Hollywood became the world capital of film production. THE STUDIO SYSTEM: It was the studio system that came into existence in Hollywood that made the films typically commercial. The studio system emerged due to the increase in demand for films. The system evolved gradually in the years following the World War1, which ended in 1918. To meet the demand for more movies, it focused more on quantity than on quality. It was Thomas Ince, himself a film director (Civilization,--1916 -- was his best known film) who conceived film production as a factory system, thus paving the way for the emergence of Hollywood studio system. “Film is actually a collaborative art, and Ince learned how to bring the talents of many different people into a system that produced polished films, without the individualizing touches found in those films of Griffith or others who work outside the strict studio system.” (Robert A.Armour, 1980). The studio system consisted of companies that owned the studios where films were produced. These companies decided the material to be filmed, they owned and controlled the regularly paid stars who were treated like workers, (“More stars than there are in the heaven” was the motto of Metro –Goldwyn Mayer during it’s hey day), dictated which directors would make which films .Their motto was to produce more movies at lower cost. It was this powerful studio system that ran Hollywood from the late '20s through the '60s. Thus production process was broken down to and organized into various compartments. The producer with a budget was the central figure. Under him there were directors, Script writers, actors, technicians, mechanics, costumers, makeup men and people who took care of the publicity materials. It was an entertainment factory with clear division of labor. The production plan for every year is prepared well in advance; budget decided and the assembly line is kept flowing. In the early years of film production, different departments of the film industry were controlled separately. The diverse controls lead to diversification of profits too. As the industry grew and as the studio system stabilized, the companies that owned the studios wanted more profits. So they took up other departments of the industry, to maximize profit by what was called vertical integration. These companies started big theatres in different cities, and monopolized not only the production of films, but also their distribution and exhibition. By 1929, five big production companies monopolized Hollywood. They not only produced 90 percent of feature films in America, but also distributed them nationally as well as internationally. They owned a chain of theatres in United States, for exhibition of their own films. These companies were dubbed as The Big Five. In addition, there were three minor studios too. Each of these studios had an identity of their own. The following were The Big Five: 1) Metro –Goldwyn- Mayer. Three US film production companies, Metro Pictures Corporation, founded in 1916, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation (1917) and Louis B. Mayer Pictures Company (1918) merged together in 1924 to form one of the biggest production companies in United States --- The Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer. The lion roar in the studios opening logo was famous all over the world and gave MGM a different identity. This opening logo was recorded in 1928.MGM was a studio of stars. (“More stars than there are in the heaven”).Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Mickey Rooney, and Norman Shearer were some of the stars who belonged to MGM. Some of their successful films were The Big Parade (1925), Broadway Melody (1929) Grand Hotel (1932) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935 )A Night at the Opera (1935) The Good Earth ( 1937) Gone With the wind (1939) The wizard of Oz (1939 ). The Tarzan films and Tom and Jerry cartoons also were MGM products. 2) Paramount Pictures: Adolph Zukor’s company called ‘Famous players’ and Jesse Lasky’s ‘Feature Play’ merged in 1916 and became The Paramount studios in 1927. It was renamed as Paramount Pictures in 1935 .While MGM was a studio stars, Paramount was a studio of writers and directors, like Cecil. DeMille, Ernst Lubitsch, Leo McCarey, Joseph von Sternberg, Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges. Their silent era super stars were Mary Pick ford and Douglas Fairbanks and golden age stars included Mae West, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby. 3) Warner Bros. Pictures: A studio incorporated by the Polish brothers, Jack, Sam, Albert, Harry, Warner Brothers merged with another company called First National in 1925, to form Warner Bros.-First National Pictures. Warner Brothers were famous for their gangster films, biographies and musicals, with directors like William Wellman, Mervyn LeRoy, William Dieterle, Busby Berkeley and stars like Paul Muni, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Dick Powell, and James Cagney. 4) Twentieth Century Fox: The Fox Film Corporation was founded by William Fox in 1912.In 1935 the Fox Corporation merged with 20th Century Pictures Company ( formed in 1933) to become Twentieth Century Fox. They were famous for the comedy films of Shirley Temple, and also for the historical and adventure films directed by John Ford, Henry King and Henry Hathaway with Henry Fonda and Tyrone Powell. 5) RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures: This was the smallest of the five majors. They excelled in musicals of Fred Astaire, comedies with Cary Grant and comedies and adventure films directed by Howard Hawks. CRITIQUE OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM: The studio system was slanted more towards commerce than art. Because of this, many critics refused to see Hollywood studio films as art at all. Mass production and assembly lines are alien to art. The studio movies entertained people, with dream like myths far removed from the realities of life. “The stars, the glamour, the glossy perfection of the studio films played upon the audience’s wishes and dreams, transporting them to a far more satisfying kingdom than the dreary reality outside the movie theatre.” (Gerald Mast1981) Critics like Andrew Sarris (1976), refused to consider Hollywood even as a centre of cinematic art: Somewhere on the western shores of United States, a group of men have gathered to rob cinema of its birth right. If the forest critic (Of course, the forest to which I refer is called Hollywood) be politically oriented, he will describe these coastal conspirators as capitalists. If aesthetically oriented, he will describe them as philistines. Either way, an entity called cinema has been betrayed by another entity called Hollywood. Hollywood remained marginalized in all serious film studies. Some, like Andrew Sarris, even called it the bane of the art of cinema (“an entity called cinema has been betrayed by another entity called Hollywood “). At the same time, one must admit that Films like Orson Well’s Citizen Kane, films of Fritz Lang, the great comedies of the silent era, including that of Charlie Chaplin came from Hollywood, when the studio system was very strong and stable. All the interior scenes of Citizen Kane were nothing but the studio props. But Wells created beauty out of this. In addition, Orson Wells and his camera man Greg Toland contributed to the aesthetics of cinema by using wide angle lens, for dramatic purposes, there by creating what was known later as “deep focus” and the “depth of field”. Fritz Lang was an import to the Hollywood. He never saw daylight in his more than twenty years of life in America. He was always confined to the interior of the studios so also were his films. All his films had an optimistic happy ending as dictated by the managers of the “dream factory” called Hollywood. But in spite of all these he was able to make wonderful films like You Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window and Human Desire, in spite of being in Hollywood with all its limitations, regimentations and factory like ambience alien not only to cinema but to any creative endeavors. EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA: The Hollywood studio system which made the cinema more an industrial product than an art work faced resistance from those who dreamed of making cinema the art form of the century. Thus many movements came into being in different parts of Europe and in other parts of the world, which produced an alternate cinema or experimental cinema. One of the earliest such movement was Italian Neo Realism, which was a sort of a resistance towards Hollywood cinema. Because of the commercial power of the Hollywood cinema, national cinemas of different countries were either subjugated or were forced to copy the Hollywood pattern of story telling. This cultural and ideological hegemony and over dominance of the Hollywood style of film making created a natural resistance to it in different countries. The first such prominent resistant cinema was from Italy and was called the Italian Neo Realism. Hollywood cinema told the stories of a paradise, a paradise called United States. The realities depicted in these films were far removed from the realities of life outside the cinema theatre. Italian Neo-realists turned the camera towards the life of the poor and downtrodden. As a revolt to the Hollywood studio system, they came out of the studios and started shooting in real outdoor locations. As a counter response to the Hollywood star system, they avoided glamorous stars and made the common people the actors. The main role of the protagonist in Vittoria De Sica’s Bicycle thief (1948) was acted by a factory worker named Lamberto Maggiorani.Thus cinema became more humane. Less capital oriented with the Italian Neo-realism. The emergence of such an alternate cinema encouraged such movements in other countries which finally lead to the decline of Hollywood cinema. Rome, Open City (1945) by Roberto Rossellini, and La Strada (1954) by Federico Fellini are other major Italian Neo Realist films FRENCH NEW WAVE: French New Wave is another experimental film movement that got inspired by the Italian Neo- realism and revolted against the Hollywood Commercial film tradition. The marvelous five directors that made the French New Wave were Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Romer, Jacques Rivette and Jean- Luc Godard. By analyzing the film Breathless by Godard, one of the earliest new wave films, one can understand the experimental style of film making resorted to by the French New Wave. In an oft-quoted interview in the French film journal, Cahiers du cinema, Godard describes his works thus: “Today I still think myself as a film critic and in a sense I am., more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them.” (Cahiers du Cinema, 1962) Goddard’s concept of cinema as an essay is reflected in this quote. He artistically expresses this concept through his first feature film, A bout de soufflé or Breathless which was released in 1960. Breathless is about almost forty eight hours of the life of a petty criminal called Michel ( Jean Paul Belmondo ) and his romance with an American girl named Patricia (Jean seberg).The film starts with Michel stealing a car at Marseilles and driving to Paris where he is to meet Patricia. They have met three weeks earlier, according to the back story revealed through dialogues and have slept a few nights together. On his way to Paris he is caught for over speeding and shoots at and kills the police man. This makes him an object of man hunt. In Paris he plans to collect some money he is owed by a friend and to leave to Italy with Patricia. But Patricia is confused .She wants to be a professional writer and gets her first assignment too. She doesn’t want to skip that opportunity by going after Michel the criminal. On the other hand she sees Michel exciting. But finally she decides to quit him. Michel accepts his fate, but by then the cops come hunting him. They shoot him dead on the street. While dying Michel calls Patricia a scumbag. “What does that mean?” --- Staring at the camera she asks, and turns away. How can a film with such a seemingly silly plot be called the manifesto of experimental cinema ?It can be and still is because this film brings in a paradigm shift as far as the plot and linear narrative of the Hollywood inspired mainstream French cinema or even of the commercial cinema world over, are concerned. These main stream Hollywood influenced films, were telling stories through smooth flow of images based on literary text supported by “quality” production. Breathless subverts all these ideals of film making as well as film structure. The most interesting aspect of this film is that Godard has chosen a Hollywood genre, that of the gangster film or film noir to subvert its own traditional structure. And he ends up creating a parody of a gangster film! “The unseizable fluctuation between imitation and parody of the American gagster mode” as Peter Harcourt (1976) calls it. (Godard even made a film, Le Mepris, which was an obit to the dying Hollywood Cinema. “Le Mepris is an exercise in cinematic metaphor- especially Hollywood. Of course all Godard’s films are to one degree or another essays in cinema, but Le Mepris takes the world of commercial film making as its subject matter as well as its subtext.” (James Monaco, 1977) The change of attitude towards the film structure is evident from the very opening scene of Breathless. The film opens on the last page of the news paper- a Paris-flirt pin up -which carries an advertisement showing a woman in lingerie. This opening shot is so different from the opening of an American gangster film, which will usually open with an establishing shot of a place or location where the investigative story is going to unfold. Our attention here is never caught up with any plot suggestion. But in the subsequent shots we get a glimpse of the signs of a gangster film. The news paper falls and a man smoking a cigarette is seen. He is a typical image of a gangster film tough. His stance and dress all tell us. If the viewer misses the point, Godard in his own way makes him mimic the historical Holly movie tough represented by Humphrey Bogart in the forties. Mimicking Bogart, Godard makes his hero remove the cigarette from his mouth and rub his lips with his thumb; a parody in details! (Bogart had a trade mark scar on his lips; and here is Bogart ventriloquism by Belmondo!) The here later steals a car from the road side and drives away. But he is stopped by a police man for speeding. He shoots the police man. Shooting is shown not continuously, but in bits. The hero’s arm; pan from the arm to the gun. The barrel of the gun, the police man falling as we hear the gun shot. The hero runs away across a field. This is the opening sequence of Breathless. Five important images are introduced in this opening sequence – The gangster, the girl, the car, the gun and the police. But these images were not cut in a pattern usual to the main stream cinema. Even the expected establishing shot was missing. The hero at certain point looks into the camera and tells the audience to go to hell if they can’t understand him! The Hollywood cinema runs on the screen pretending not to be conscious of the audience. It also makes the audience forget their own existence. Instead Godard reminds the audience that they are there and that he knows that they are there watching his film. The fictional space and the safe anonymity of the spectator are all broken up here. These provocative techniques right from the opening sequence of the Breathless invited infuriated criticism from conventionalists. Godard was accused of showing disrespect to the film language and even to the spectators. But he is not the one to be shaken. He was intentionally trying to break the traditional language of cinema, a language which made the spectator believe the unreal on the screen as real. He went on breaking the tradition, intentionally, even after Breathless. Godard responds thus: “When I was making Breathless, or my early shorts, a shot of seberg would be made from a purely cinematic point of view, making sure that her head was just at the right cinematic angle and so on. Now I just do things without worrying how they will appear cinematically.” (Sight and sound, 1962-63). Breathless is synonymous with very untraditional editing technique called the Jump Cut. Jump cut as an unconventional editing technique is defined like this by Karl Reisz, and Gavin Millar (1989): “Cutting together two discontinuous parts of a continuous action without changing the set up. He cuts abruptly from one scene to another with little warning and no attempt at smoothness.” The abrupt jumps with in the shot condense the time, while the space remains the same. Editing is invisible in the mainstream cinema. The more invisible the editing is, the more it serves the commercial purpose-- that is keeping the spectator immersed in the action, thus ensuring the presence of an unquestioning, undoubting witness. Gordard's jump cut leaves visual gaps for the spectator to fill up mentally. Here the viewer has to assume a more critical role while viewing the film. According to Robert Philip Kolker (1983) “Breathless not only gives the feeling of cinematic techniques being invented, but allows the experience of viewing to be rediscovered.” .Peter Harcourt (1976) adds that Jump cuts “embody in the texture of the film itself the uncertainties and fragmentariness that form the basic ingredients of its view of life and the view of life of many Godard films to follow.” According to Harcourt, jump cuts and restless tracking shots “fills the film with a feeling of persecution, a sense of net closing in” as a part of its film noir atmosphere. He used many other unconventional techniques while making this film, like hand held arriflex camera, real locations out side the studios and realistic lighting.) When asked by Gordon Gow about the making of Breathless, Godard replied: That he doesn't hold with rules and he was out to destroy accepted conventions of film-making. Hiroshima, Mon amour, he said, was the start of something new, and Breathless was the end of something old. He made it on real locations and in real rooms, having no truck with studios. He employed a hand-held camera, and having finished the shooting, he chopped it about as a manifestation of filmic anarchy, technical iconoclasm (Gordon Gow, 1961) AUTEURISM: Breathless (1960) along with Truffaut’s 400 blows (1959) pose new wave’s first challenge to Hollywood studio system. Under the studio system there was no author for the film. The films were known after the production companies, like a MGM film, with the famous lion roar in the opening logo or a Paramount film or a film by Warner brothers. It was the new wave film makers, who gave the authorship of cinema back to the film director by formulating the auteur theory. Film in spite of being a seemingly collaborative art, is the art of the director. It is his creative product, his baby. Not only that, the whole body of work of a director, meaning his whole films will have a stamp of his authorship, according to the auteur theory. Jims Kitses (1969) explains the theory thus : “The term describes a basic principle and a method , no more and no less: the idea of personal authorship in the cinema and –of key importance-the concomitant responsibility to honor all of the directors works by systematic examination in order to trace characteristic themes , structures and formal qualities .” OTHER EXPERIMENTAL STREAMS: 1960’s saw emergence of strong national cinema in Latin America. Two main movements that emerged were the Third Cinema movement in Argentina and the Cinema Novo movement in Brazil. Fernando Solanas and Octavio gettino (Argentina) Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Galuber Rocha (Brazil) were the leading film makers of these movements. Both these movements rejected the studio made star studded film aesthetics of the Hollywood as well as the aesthetics of the rich colonial European cinema. This cinema tried to alien the spectator by employing the Brechtian and Eisenstenian techniques. The spectator is never allowed to get emotionally involved in the film. . This cinema demanded an alert, thinking and questioning and a politically active spectator. He was never allowed to remain passive but is constantly disturbed.Glauber Rocha (Johnson and Stam 1982) calls it the “film of discomfort” made out of “crude images, muffled dialogue and unwanted noise on the sound track, of editing accidents and unclear credits and titles”. The Hour of the Furnaces by Fernando Solanas and Octavio gettino (Argentina) Antonio das Mortes by Glauber Rocha are some of the prominent films of this movement. AVANT-GARDE FILMS: Yet another experimental film stream is the Avant –Garde films produced in different part of the world at different times. The Dadaist and Surrealist films of 1920’s represent the European Avant Garde. Rene Clair’s Entr’acte (1924) Luis Bunuel’s UN chien andalou (1929), abstract films by Oskar Fischinger, animated shorts by Hans Richter were all a part of the European Avant Garde.1950s French Impressionists like Abel Gance, Jean Epstein made an impact with their films with narrative and editing experimentations. Thus the experimental Cinema questioned and broke the soothing continuity of the linear narrative, uninterrupted dream like editing, star studded glamour that has little to do with the quality of cinema, all of which were the characteristics of the commercial or mainstream cinema. Experimental cinema was trying to portray the reality more closely and accurately. It was trying to engage the viewer more consciously, trying to make him awake to his own realities. According to Ingmar Bergman (1988) “Cinema if not a document is a dream”. The experimental cinema was trying to find a unique space between the document and the dream. ============================================== Works Cited: 1) Armour A.Robert, Film : A Reference Guide ( Page 19)Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1980 2) Bergman Ingmar, The Magic Latern ,Penguin Books, Viking Penguin inc.,40West, 23rd Street, New York, 1988 3) Cahiers du Cinema, Paris, December 1962 4) Gow Gordon, "Breathless," Films and Filming (Page 25)August 1961 5) Harcourt Peter, Six European Directors, Penguin Books Ltd, Middlesex England , 1976 6) Kolker Philip Robert, Altering Eye,( Page 177-78 ) Contemporary International Cinema, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983 7) Kitses Jim, Horizons West (Page7) Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1969) 8) Mast Gerald ,The Studio Years, The American Cinema (Page 248) Edited by Donald E. Staples, Voice of America Forum Series, United States International Communication Agency Washington , D.C.,1981 9) Monaco James, The New Wave (Page 134), Oxford University Press, New York ,1977 10) Reisz Karl, and Millar Gavin Technique of Film Editing, second Edition (Page 345) Focal Press June 23, 1989 11) Rocha Galuber,The Tricontinental Film Maker: That is Called the Dawn , Robert Stam and Randal Johnson,eds.,Brazilian Cinema, Associated University Press 1982 12) Sarris Andrew, A Theory of Film History , Movies and Methods, Vol.1, (Page 239) Edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California,1976 13) Sight and Sound, winter 1962-63, Godard, Interview with Tom Milne. Read More