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cinematography
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(sin-uh-muh-tahg'-ruh-fee)
Cinematography is the technique and art of making motion pictures, which are a
sequence of photographs of a single subject that are taken over time and then
projected in the same sequence to create an illusion of motion. Each image of a
moving object is slightly different from the preceding one.
Projector
A motion-picture projector projects the sequence of picture frames, contained
on a ribbon of film, in their proper order. A claw engages perforations in the
film and pulls the film down into the film gate, placing each new frame in
exactly the same position as the preceding one. When the frame is in position,
it is projected onto the screen by illuminating it with a beam of light. The
period of time between the projection of each still image when no image is
projected is normally not noticed by the viewer.
Two perceptual phenomena--persistence of vision and the critical flicker
frequency--cause a continuous image. Persistence of a vision is the ability of
the viewer to retain or in some way remember the impression of an image after
it has been withdrawn from view. The critical flicker frequency is the minimum
rate of interruption of the projected light beam that will not cause the motion
picture to appear to flicker. A frequency above about 48 interruptions a
second will eliminate flicker.
Camera
Like a still camera (see CAMERA), a movie camera shoots each picture
individually. The movie camera, however, must also move the film precisely and
control the shutter, keeping the amount of light reaching the film nearly
constant from frame to frame. The shutter of a movie camera is essentially a
circular plate rotated by an electric motor. An opening in the plate exposes
the film frame only after the film has been positioned and has come to rest.
The plate itself continues to rotate smoothly.
Photographic materials must be manufactured with great precision. The
perforations, or holes in the film, must be precisely positioned. The
pitch--the distance from one hole to another--must be maintained by correct
film storage. By the late 1920s, a sound-on-film system of synchronous SOUND
RECORDING was developed and gained widespread popularity. In this process, the
sound is recorded separately on a machine synchronized with the picture camera.
Unlike the picture portion of the film, the sound portion is recorded and
played back continuously rather than in intermittent motion. Although editing
still makes use of perforated film for flexibility, a more modern technique
uses conventional magnetic tape for original recording and synchronizes the
recording to the picture electronically (see TAPE RECORDER).
If the number of photographs projected per unit time (frame rate) differs from
the number produced per unit time by the camera, an apparent speeding up or
slowing down of the normal rate is created. Changes in the frame rates are
used occasionally for comic effect or motion analysis.
Cinematography becomes an art when the filmmaker attempts to make moving images
that relate directly to human perception, provide visual significance and
information, and provoke emotional response.
History of Film Technology
Several parlor toys of the early 1800s used visual illusions similar to those
of the motion picture. These include the thaumatrope (1825); the
phenakistiscope (1832); the stroboscope (1832); and the zoetrope (1834).
The photographic movie, however, was first used as a means of investigation
rather than of theatrical illusion. Leland Stanford, then governor of
California, hired photographer Eadweard MUYBRIDGE to prove that at some time in
a horse's gallop all four legs are simultaneously off the ground. Muybridge
did so by using several cameras to produce a series of photographs with very
short time intervals between them. Such a multiple photographic record was
used in the kinetoscope, which displayed a photographic moving image and was
commercially successful for a time.
The kinetoscope was invented either by Thomas Alva EDISON or by his assistant
William K. L. Dickson, both of whom had experimented originally with moving
pictures as a supplement to the phonograph record. They later turned to George
EASTMAN, who provided a flexible celluloid film base to store the large number
of images necessary to create motion pictures.
The mechanical means of cinematography were gradually perfected. It was
discovered that it was better to display the sequence of images intermittently
rather than continuously. This technique allowed a greater presentation time
and more light for the projection of each frame. Another improvement was the
loop above and below the film gate in both the camera and the projector, which
prevented the film from tearing.
By the late 1920s, synchronized sound was being introduced in movies. These
sound films soon replaced silent films in popularity. To prevent the
microphones from picking up camera noise, a portable housing was designed that
muffled noises and allowed the camera to be moved about. In recent years,
equipment, lighting, and film have all been improved, but the processes
involved remain essentially the same. RICHARD FLOBERG
Bibliography
Bibliography: Fielding, Raymond, ed., A Technological History of Motion
Pictures and Television (1967); Happe, I. Bernard, Basic Motion Picture
Technology, 2d ed. (1975); Malkiewicz, J. Kris, and Rogers, Robert E.,
Cinematography (1973); Wheeler, Leslie J., Principles of Cinematography, 4th
ed. (1973).
film:
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film, history of
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The history of film has been dominated by the discovery and testing of the
paradoxes inherent in the medium itself. Film uses machines to record images
of life; it combines still photographs to give the illusion of continuous
motion; it seems to present life itself, but it also offers impossible
unrealities approached only in dreams.^The motion picture was developed in the
1890s from the union of still PHOTOGRAPHY, which records physical reality, with
the persistence-of-vision toy, which made drawn figures appear to move. Four
major film traditions have developed since then: fictional narrative film,
which tells stories about people with whom an audience can identify because
their world looks familiar; nonfictional documentary film, which focuses on the
real world either to instruct or to reveal some sort of truth about it;
animated film, which makes drawn or sculpted figures look as if they are moving
and speaking; and experimental film, which exploits film's ability to create a
purely abstract, nonrealistic world unlike any previously seen.^Film is
considered the youngest art form and has inherited much from the older and more
traditional arts. Like the novel, it can tell stories; like the drama, it can
portray conflict between live characters; like painting, it composes in space
with light, color, shade, shape, and texture; like music, it moves in time
according to principles of rhythm and tone; like dance, it presents the
movement of figures in space and is often underscored by music; and like
photography, it presents a two-dimensional rendering of what appears to be
three-dimensional reality, using perspective, depth, and shading.^Film,
however, is one of the few arts that is both spatial and temporal,
intentionally manipulating both space and time. This synthesis has given rise
to two conflicting theories about film and its historical development. Some
theorists, such as S. M. EISENSTEIN and Rudolf Arnheim, have argued that film
must take the path of the other modern arts and concentrate not on telling
stories or representing reality but on investigating time and space in a pure
and consciously abstract way. Others, such as Andre Bazin and Siegfried
KRACAUER, maintain that film must fully and carefully develop its connection
with nature so that it can portray human events as excitingly and revealingly
as possible.^Because of his fame, his success at publicizing his activities,
and his habit of patenting machines before actually inventing them, Thomas
EDISON received most of the credit for having invented the motion picture; as
early as 1887, he patented a motion picture camera, but this could not produce
images. In reality, many inventors contributed to the development of moving
pictures. Perhaps the first important contribution was the series of motion
photographs made by Eadweard MUYBRIDGE between 1872 and 1877. Hired by the
governor of California, Leland Stanford, to capture on film the movement of a
racehorse, Muybridge tied a series of wires across the track and connected each
one to the shutter of a still camera. The running horse tripped the wires and
exposed a series of still photographs, which Muybridge then mounted on a
stroboscopic disk and projected with a magic lantern to reproduce an image of
the horse in motion. Muybridge shot hundreds of such studies and went on to
lecture in Europe, where his work intrigued the French scientist E. J. MAREY.
Marey devised a means of shooting motion photographs with what he called a
photographic gun.^Edison became interested in the possibilities of motion
photography after hearing Muybridge lecture in West Orange, N.J. Edison's
motion picture experiments, under the direction of William Kennedy Laurie
Dickson, began in 1888 with an attempt to record the photographs on wax
cylinders similar to those used to make the original phonograph recordings.
Dickson made a major breakthrough when he decided to use George EASTMAN's
celluloid film instead. Celluloid was tough but supple and could be
manufactured in long rolls, making it an excellent medium for motion
photography, which required great lengths of film. Between 1891 and 1895,
Dickson shot many 15-second films using the Edison camera, or Kinetograph, but
Edison decided against projecting the films for audiences--in part because the
visual results were inadequate and in part because he felt that motion pictures
would have little public appeal. Instead, Edison marketed an electrically
driven peep-hole viewing machine (the Kinetoscope) that displayed the marvels
recorded to one viewer at a time.^Edison thought so little of the Kinetoscope
that he failed to extend his patent rights to England and Europe, an oversight
that allowed two Frenchmen, Louis and Auguste LUMIERE, to manufacture a more
portable camera and a functional projector, the Cinematographe, based on
Edison's machine. The movie era might be said to have begun officially on Dec.
28, 1895, when the Lumieres presented a program of brief motion pictures to a
paying audience in the basement of a Paris cafe. English and German inventors
also copied and improved upon the Edison machines, as did many other
experimenters in the United States. By the end of the 19th century vast
numbers of people in both Europe and America had been exposed to some form of
motion pictures.^The earliest films presented 15- to 60-second glimpses of real
scenes recorded outdoors (workmen, trains, fire engines, boats, parades,
soldiers) or of staged theatrical performances shot indoors. These two early
tendencies--to record life as it is and to dramatize life for artistic
effect--can be viewed as the two dominant paths of film history.^Georges MELIES
was the most important of the early theatrical filmmakers. A magician by
trade, Melies, in such films as A Trip to the Moon (1902), showed how the
cinema could perform the most amazing magic tricks of all: simply by stopping
the camera, adding something to the scene or removing something from it, and
then starting the camera again, he made things seem to appear and disappear.
Early English and French filmmakers such as Cecil Hepworth, James Williamson,
and Ferdinand Zecca also discovered how rhythmic movement (the chase) and
rhythmic editing could make cinema's treatment of time and space more exciting.
American Film in the Silent Era (1903-1928)
A most interesting primitive American film was The Great Train Robbery (1903),
directed by Edwin S. PORTER of the Edison Company. This early western used
much freer editing and camera work than usual to tell its story, which included
bandits, a holdup, a chase by a posse, and a final shoot-out. When other
companies (Vitagraph, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Lubin, and
Kalem among them) began producing films that rivaled those of the Edison
Company, Edison sued them for infringement of his patent rights. This
so-called patents war lasted 10 years (1898-1908), ending only when nine
leading film companies merged to form the Motion Picture Patents Company.^One
reason for the settlement was the enormous profits to be derived from what had
begun merely as a cheap novelty. Before 1905 motion pictures were usually
shown in vaudeville houses as one act on the bill. After 1905 a growing number
of small, storefront theaters called nickelodeons, accommodating less than 200
patrons, began to show motion pictures exclusively. By 1908 an estimated 10
million Americans were paying their nickels and dimes to see such films. Young
speculators such as William Fox and Marcus Loew saw their theaters, which
initially cost but $1,600 each, grow into enterprises worth $150,000 each
within 5 years. Called the drama of the people, the early motion pictures
attracted primarily working-class and immigrant audiences who found the
nickelodeon a pleasant family diversion; they might not have been able to read
the words in novels and newspapers, but they understood the silent language of
pictures.^The popularity of the moving pictures led to the first attacks
against it by crusading moralists, police, and politicians. Local censorship
boards were established to eliminate objectionable material from films. In
1909 the infant U.S. film industry waged a counterattack by creating the first
of many self-censorship boards, the National Board of Censorship (after 1916
called the National Board of Review), whose purpose was to set moral standards
for films and thereby save them from costly mutilation.^A nickelodeon program
consisted of about six 10-minute films, usually including an adventure, a
comedy, an informational film, a chase film, and a melodrama. The most
accomplished maker of these films was Biograph's D. W. GRIFFITH, who almost
singlehandedly transformed both the art and the business of the motion picture.
Griffith made over 400 short films between 1908 and 1913, in this period
discovering or developing almost every major technique by which film
manipulates time and space: the use of alternating close-ups, medium shots,
and distant panoramas; the subtle control of rhythmic editing; the effective
use of traveling shots, atmospheric lighting, narrative commentary, poetic
detail, and visual symbolism; and the advantages of understated acting, at
which his acting company excelled. The culmination of Griffith's work was The
Birth of a Nation (1915), a mammoth, 3-hour epic of the Civil War and
Reconstruction. Its historical detail, suspense, and passionate conviction
were to outdate the 10-minute film altogether.^The decade between 1908 and 1918
was one of the most important in the history of American film. The full-length
feature film replaced the program of short films; World War I destroyed or
restricted the film industries of Europe, promoting greater technical
innovation, growth, and commercial stability in America; the FILM INDUSTRY was
consolidated with the founding of the first major studios in Hollywood, Calif.
(Fox, Paramount, and Universal); and the great American silent comedies were
born. Mack SENNETT became the driving force behind the Keystone Company soon
after joining it in 1912; Hal Roach founded his comedy company in 1914; and
Charlie CHAPLIN probably had the best-known face in the world in 1916.^During
this period the first movie stars rose to fame, replacing the anonymous players
of the short films. In 1918, America's two favorite stars, Charlie Chaplin and
Mary PICKFORD, both signed contracts for over $1 million. Other familiar stars
of the decade included comedians Fatty ARBUCKLE and John Bunny, cowboys William
S. HART and Bronco Billy Anderson, matinee idols Rudolph VALENTINO and John
Gilbert, and the alluring females Theda BARA and Clara BOW. Along with the
stars came the first movie fan magazines; Photoplay published its inaugural
issue in 1912. That same year also saw the first of the FILM SERIALS, The
Perils of Pauline, starring Pearl White.^The next decade in American film
history, 1918 to 1928, was a period of stabilization rather than expansion.
Films were made within studio complexes, which were, in essence, factories
designed to produce films in the same way that Henry Ford's factories produced
automobiles. Film companies became monopolies in that they not only made films
but distributed them to theaters and owned the theaters in which they were
shown as well. This vertical integration formed the commercial foundation of
the film industry for the next 30 years. Two new producing companies founded
during the decade were Warner Brothers (1923), which would become powerful with
its early conversion to synchronized sound, and Metro-Goldwyn (1924; later
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), the producing arm of Loew's, under the direction of Louis
B. MAYER and Irving THALBERG.^Attacks against immorality in films intensified
during this decade, spurred by the sensual implications and sexual practices of
the movie stars both on and off the screen. In 1921, after several nationally
publicized sex and drug scandals, the industry headed off the threat of federal
CENSORSHIP by creating the office of the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors of America (now the Motion Picture Association of America), under
the direction of Will HAYS. Hays, who had been postmaster general of the
United States and Warren G. Harding's campaign manager, began a series of
public relations campaigns to underscore the importance of motion pictures to
American life. He also circulated several lists of practices that were
henceforth forbidden on and off the screen.^Hollywood films of the 1920s became
more polished, subtle, and skillful, and especially imaginative in handling the
absence of sound. It was the great age of comedy. Chaplin retained a hold on
his world-following with full-length features such as The Kid (1920) and The
Gold Rush (1925); Harold LLOYD climbed his way to success--and got the girl--no
matter how great the obstacles as Grandma's Boy (1922) or The Freshman (1925);
Buster KEATON remained deadpan through a succession of wildly bizarre sight
gags in Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator (both 1924); Harry Langdon was ever the
innocent elf cast adrift in a mean, tough world; and director Ernst LUBITSCH,
fresh from Germany, brought his "touch" to understated comedies of manners,
sex, and marriage. The decade saw the United States's first great war film
(The Big Parade, 1925), its first great westerns (The Covered Wagon, 1923; The
Iron Horse, 1924), and its first great biblical epics (The Ten Commandments,
1923, and King of Kings, 1927, both made by Cecil B. DE MILLE). Other films
of this era included Erich Von STROHEIM's sexual studies, Lon CHANEY's
grotesque costume melodramas, and the first great documentary feature, Robert
J. FLAHERTY's Nanook of the North (1922).
European Film in the 1920s
In the same decade, the European film industries recovered from the war to
produce one of the richest artistic periods in film history. The German
cinema, stimulated by EXPRESSIONISM in painting and the theater and by the
design theories of the BAUHAUS, created bizarrely expressionistic settings for
such fantasies as Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919), F. W.
MURNAU's Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz LANG's Metropolis (1927). The Germans
also brought their sense of decor, atmospheric lighting, and penchant for a
frequently moving camera to such realistic political and psychological studies
as Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924), G. W. PABST's The Joyless Street (1925),
and E. A. Dupont's Variety (1925).^Innovation also came from the completely
different approach taken by filmmakers in the USSR, where movies were intended
not only to entertain but also to instruct the masses in the social and
political goals of their new government. The Soviet cinema used MONTAGE, or
complicated editing techniques that relied on visual metaphor, to create
excitement and richness of texture and, ultimately, to affect ideological
attitudes. The most influential Soviet theorist and filmmaker was Sergei M.
Eisenstein, whose Potemkin (1925) had a worldwide impact; other innovative
Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s included V. I. PUDOVKIN, Lev Kuleshov, Abram
Room, and Alexander DOVZHENKO.^The Swedish cinema of the 1920s relied heavily
on the striking visual qualities of the northern landscape. Mauritz Stiller
and Victor Sjostrom mixed this natural imagery of mountains, sea, and ice with
psychological drama and tales of supernatural quests. French cinema, by
contrast, brought the methods and assumptions of modern painting to film.
Under the influence of SURREALISM and dadaism, filmmakers working in France
began to experiment with the possibility of rendering abstract perceptions or
dreams in a visual medium. Marcel DUCHAMP, Rene CLAIR, Fernand LEGER, Jean
RENOIR--and Luis BUNUEL and Salvador DALI in Un Chien andalou (1928)--all made
antirealist, antirational, noncommercial films that helped establish the
avant-garde tradition in filmmaking. Several of these filmmakers would later
make significant contributions to the narrative tradition in the sound era.
The Arrival of Sound
The era of the talking film began in late 1927 with the enormous success of
Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer. The first totally sound film, Lights of New
York, followed in 1928. Although experimentation with synchronizing sound and
picture was as old as the cinema itself (Dickson, for example, made a rough
synchronization of the two for Edison in 1894), the feasibility of sound film
was widely publicized only after Warner Brothers purchased the Vitaphone from
Western Electric in 1926. The original Vitaphone system synchronized the
picture with a separate phonographic disk, rather than using the more accurate
method of recording (based on the principle of the OSCILLOSCOPE) a sound track
on the film itself. Warners originally used the Vitaphone to make short
musical films featuring both classical and popular performers and to record
musical sound tracks for otherwise silent films (Don Juan, 1926). For The Jazz
Singer, Warners added four synchronized musical sequences to the silent film.
When Al JOLSON sang and then delivered several lines of dialogue, audiences
were electrified. The silent film was dead within a year.^The conversion to
synchronized sound caused serious problems for the film industry. Sound
recording was difficult; cameras had to shoot from inside glass booths; studios
had to build special soundproof stages; theaters required expensive new
equipment; writers had to be hired who had an ear for dialogue; and actors had
to be found whose voices could deliver it. Many of the earliest talkies were
ugly and static, the visual images serving merely as an accompaniment to
endless dialogue, sound effects, and musical numbers. Serious film critics
mourned the passing of the motion picture, which no longer seemed to contain
either motion or picture.^The most effective early sound films were those that
played most adventurously with the union of picture and sound track. Walt
DISNEY in his cartoons combined surprising sights with inventive sounds,
carefully orchestrating the animated motion and musical rhythm. Ernst Lubitsch
also played very cleverly with sound, contrasting the action depicted visually
with the information on the sound track in dazzlingly funny or revealing ways.
By 1930 the U.S. film industry had conquered both the technical and the
artistic problems involved in using sight and sound harmoniously, and the
European industry was quick to follow.
Hollywood's Golden Era
The 1930s was the golden era of the Hollywood studio film. It was the decade
of the great movie stars--Greta GARBO, Marlene DIETRICH, Jean HARLOW, Mae WEST,
Katharine HEPBURN, Bette DAVIS, Cary GRANT, Gary COOPER, Clark GABLE, James
STEWART--and some of America's greatest directors thrived on the pressures and
excitement of studio production. Josef von STERNBERG became legendary for his
use of exotic decor and sexual symbolism; Howard HAWKS made driving adventures
and fast-paced comedies; Frank CAPRA blended politics and morality in a series
of comedy-dramas; and John FORD mythified the American West.^American studio
pictures seemed to come in cycles, many of the liveliest being those that could
not have been made before synchronized sound. The gangster film introduced
Americans to the tough doings and tougher talk of big-city thugs, as played by
James CAGNEY, Paul MUNI, and Edward G. ROBINSON. Musicals included the witty
operettas of Ernst Lubitsch, with Maurice CHEVALIER and Jeanette MACDONALD; the
backstage musicals, with their kaleidoscopically dazzling dance numbers, of
Busby BERKELEY; and the smooth, more natural song-and-dance comedies starring
Fred ASTAIRE and Ginger ROGERS. Synchronized sound also produced SCREWBALL
COMEDY, which explored the dizzy doings of fast-moving, fast-thinking, and,
above all, fast-talking men and women.^The issue of artistic freedom versus
censorship raised by the movies came to the fore again with the advent of
talking pictures. Spurred by the depression that hit the industry in 1933 and
by the threat of an economic boycott by the newly formed Catholic Legion of
Decency, the motion picture industry adopted an official Production Code in
1934. Written in 1930 by Daniel Lord, S.J., and Martin Quigley, a Catholic
layman who was publisher of The Motion Picture Herald, the code explicitly
prohibited certain acts, themes, words, and implications. Will Hays appointed
Joseph I. Breen, the Catholic layman most instrumental in founding the Legion
of Decency, head of the Production Code Administration, and this awarded the
industry's seal of approval to films that met the code's moral standards. The
result was the curtailment of explicit violence and sexual innuendo, and also
of much of the flavor that had characterized films earlier in the decade.
Europe During the 1930s
The 1930s abroad did not produce films as consistently rich as those of the
previous decade. With the coming of sound, the British film industry was
reduced to satellite status. The most stylish British productions were the
historical dramas of Sir Alexander KORDA and the mystery-adventures of Alfred
HITCHCOCK. The major Korda stars, as well as Hitchcock himself, left Britain
for Hollywood before the decade ended. More innovative were the
government-funded documentaries and experimental films made by the General Post
Office Film Unit under the direction of John Grierson.^Soviet filmmakers had
problems with the early sound-film machines and with the application of montage
theory (a totally visual conception) to sound filming. They were further
plagued by restrictive Stalinist policies, policies that sometimes kept such
ambitious film artists as Pudovkin and Eisenstein from making films altogether.
The style of the German cinema was perfectly suited to sound filming, and
German films of the period 1928-32 show some of the most creative uses of the
medium in the early years of sound. When the Nazis came to power in 1933,
however, almost all the creative film talent left Germany. An exception was
Leni RIEFENSTAHL, whose theatrical documentary Triumph of the Will (1934)
represents a highly effective example of the German propaganda films made
during the decade.^French cinema, the most exciting alternative to Hollywood in
the 1930s, produced many of France's most classic films. The decade found
director Jean Renoir--in Grand Illusion (1937) and Rules of the Game (1939)--at
the height of his powers; Rene Clair mastered both the musical fantasy and the
sociopolitical satire (A Nous la liberte, 1931); Marcel PAGNOL brought to the
screen his trilogy of Marseilles life, Fanny; the young Jean VIGO, in only two
films, brilliantly expressed youthful rebellion and mature love; and director
Marcel CARNE teamed with poet Jacques Prevert to produce haunting existential
romances of lost love and inevitable death in Quai des brumes (1938) and Le
Jour se leve (1939).
Hollywood: World War II, Postwar Decline
During World War II, films were required to lift the spirits of Americans both
at home and overseas. Many of the most accomplished Hollywood directors and
producers went to work for the War Department. Frank Capra produced the "Why
We Fight" series (1942-45); Walt Disney, fresh from his Snow White (1937) and
Fantasia (1940) successes, made animated informational films; and Garson KANIN,
John HUSTON, and William WYLER all made documentaries about important battles.
Among the new American directors to make remarkable narrative films at home
were three former screenwriters, Preston STURGES, Billy WILDER, and John
Huston. Orson WELLES, the boy genius of theater and radio fame, also came to
Hollywood to shoot Citizen Kane (1941), the strange story of a newspaper
magnate whose American dream turns into a loveless nightmare.^Between 1946 and
1953 the movie industry was attacked from many sides. As a result, the
Hollywood studio system totally collapsed. First, the U.S. House of
Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities investigated alleged
Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry in two separate sets of
hearings. In 1948, The HOLLYWOOD TEN, 10 screenwriters and directors who
refused to answer the questions of the committee, went to jail for contempt of
Congress. Then, from 1951 to 1954, in mass hearings, Hollywood celebrities
were forced either to name their associates as fellow Communists or to refuse
to answer all questions on the grounds of the 5th Amendment, protecting
themselves against self-incrimination. These hearings led the industry to
blacklist many of its most talented workers and also weakened its image in the
eyes of America and the world.^In 1948 the United States Supreme Court, ruling
in United States v. Paramount that the vertical integration of the movie
industry was monopolistic, required the movie studios to divest themselves of
the theaters that showed their pictures and thereafter to cease all unfair or
discriminatory distribution practices. At the same time, movie attendance
started a steady decline; the film industry's gross revenues fell every year
from 1947 to 1963. The most obvious cause was the rise of TELEVISION, as more
and more Americans each year stayed home to watch the entertainment they could
get most comfortably and inexpensively. In addition, European quotas against
American films bit into Hollywood's foreign revenues.^While major American
movies lost money, foreign art films were attracting an enthusiastic and
increasingly large audience, and these foreign films created social as well as
commercial difficulties for the industry. In 1951, The Miracle, a 40-minute
film by Roberto ROSSELLINI, was attacked by the New York Catholic Diocese as
sacrilegious and was banned by New York City's commissioner of licenses. The
1952 Supreme Court ruling in the Miracle case officially granted motion
pictures the right to free speech as guaranteed in the Constitution, reversing
a 1915 ruling by the Court that movies were not equivalent to speech. Although
the ruling permitted more freedom of expression in films, it also provoked
public boycotts and repeated legal tests of the definition of
obscenity.^Hollywood attempted to counter the effects of television with a
series of technological gimmicks in the early 1950s: 3-D, Cinerama, and
Cinemascope. The industry converted almost exclusively to color filming during
the decade, aided by the cheapness and flexibility of the new Eastman color
monopack, which came to challenge the monopoly of Technicolor. The content of
postwar films also began to change as Hollywood searched for a new audience and
a new style. There were more socially conscious films--such as Fred
ZINNEMANN's The Men (1950) and Elia KAZAN's On The Waterfront (1954); more
adaptations of popular novels and plays; more independent (as opposed to
studio) production; and a greater concentration on FILM NOIR--grim detective
stories in brutal urban settings. Older genres such as the Western still
flourished, and MGM brought the musical to what many consider its pinnacle in a
series of films produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Vincente MINNELLI,
Gene KELLY, and Stanley Donen.
The Film in Europe and Australia From 1950
The stimulus for defining a new film content and style came to the United
States from abroad, where many previously dormant film industries sprang to
life in the postwar years to produce an impressive array of films for the
international market. The European film renaissance can be said to have
started in Italy with such masters of NEOREALISM as Roberto Rossellini, in Open
City (1945), Vittorio DE SICA, in The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Umberto D
(1952), and Luchino VISCONTI, in La Terra Trema (1948). Federico FELLINI broke
with the tradition to make films of a more poetic and personal nature such as I
Vitelloni (1953) and La Strada (1954) and then shifted to a more sensational
style in the 1960s with La Dolce Vita (1960) and the intellectual 8 1/2 (1963).
Visconti in the 1960s and '70s would also adopt a more flamboyant approach and
subject matter in lush treatments of corruption and decadence such as The
Damned (1970). A new departure--both artistic and thematic--was evidenced by
Michelangelo ANTONIONI in his subtle psychosocial trilogy of films that began
with L'Aventura (1960). The vitality of a second generation of Italian
filmmakers was impressively demonstrated by Lina WERTMULLER in The Seduction of
Mimi (1974) and Seven Beauties (1976) and by Bernardo BERTOLUCCI, who in films
like Before the Revolution (1964), The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris
(1972), and 1900 (1977) fused radical social and political ideology with a
stunning aestheticism.^With the coming of NEW WAVE films in the late 1950s, the
French cinema reasserted the artistic primacy it had enjoyed in the prewar
period. Applying a personal style to radically different forms of film
narrative, New Wave directors included Claude CHABROL (The Cousins, 1959),
Francois TRUFFAUT (The 400 Blows, 1959; Jules and Jim, 1961), Alain RESNAIS
(Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959), and Jean-Luc GODARD, who, following the success of
his offbeat Breathless (1960), became progressively more committed to a Marxist
interpretation of society, as seen in Two or Three Things I Know About Her
(1966), Weekend (1967), and La Chinoise (1967). Eric ROHMER, mining a more
traditional vein, produced sophisticated "moral tales" in My Night at Maud's
(1968) and Claire's Knee (1970); while Louis MALLE audaciously explored such
charged subjects as incest and collaborationism in Murmur of the Heart (1971)
and Lacombe Lucien (1974). The Spaniard Luis Bunuel, working in Mexico, Spain,
and France--and defying all categorization--continued to break new ground with
ironic examinations of the role of religion (Nazarin, 1958; Viridiana, 1961;
The Milky Way, 1969) and absurdist satires on middle-class foibles (The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972).^From Sweden Ingmar BERGMAN emerged in
the 1950s as the master of introspective, often death-obsessed studies of
complex human relationships. Although capable of comedy, as in Smiles of a
Summer Night (1955), Bergman was at his most impressive in more despairing,
existentialist dramas such as The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries
(1957), Persona (1966), and Cries and Whispers (1972), in all of these aided by
a first-rate acting ensemble and brilliant cinematography.^British film,
largely reduced to a spate of Alec GUINNESS comedies by the early 1950s, was
revitalized over the next decade by the ability of directors working in England
to produce compelling cinematic translations of the "angry young man" novelists
and playwrights, of Harold PINTER's existentialist dramas, and of the
traditional great British novels. Britain regained a healthy share of the
market with films such as Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (1958); Tony
Richardson's Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of
Honey (1961), and Tom Jones (1963); Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning (1960) and Morgan (1966); Lindsay ANDERSON's This Sporting Life (1963);
Joseph LOSEY's The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967); Ken RUSSELL's Women in
Love (1969); and John Schlesinger'S Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971). The
popularity of the James Bond spy series, which began in 1962, gave the industry
an added boost.^The internationalism both of the film market and of film
distribution after 1960 was underscored by the emergence even in smaller
countries of successful film industries and widely recognized directorial
talent: Andrzej WAJDA and Roman POLANSKI in Poland; Jan KADAR, Milos FORMAN,
Ivan PASSER, and Jiri Menzel in Czechoslovakia; and, more recently, Wim
WENDERS, Werner HERZOG, and Rainer Werner FASSBINDER in West Germany. The
death (1982) of Fassbinder ended an extraordinary and prolific career, but his
absence has yet to be felt--particularly in the United States, where many of
his earlier films are being shown for the first time.^Australia is a relatively
new entrant into the contemporary world film market. Buoyed by government
subsidies, Australian directors have produced a group of major films within the
past decade: Peter WEIR's Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave (1977),
Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979) and Star Struck (1982), Fred
Schepisi's The Devil's Playground and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978), and
Bruce Beresford's Breaker Morant (1980). Beresford, Weir, and Schepisi have
since directed films with U.S. backing; Beresford's Tender Mercies (1983) is
about that most American phenomenon, the country-western singer.
Postwar Film in Asia
Thriving film industries have existed in both Japan and India since the silent
era. It was only after World War II, however, that non-Western cinematic
traditions became visible and influential internationally. The Japanese
director Akira KUROSAWA opened a door to the West with his widely acclaimed
Rashomon (1950), an investigation into the elusive nature of truth. His
samurai dramas, such as The Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), an
adaptation of Macbeth, Yojimbo (1961), and Kagemusha (1980), were ironic
adventure tales that far transcended the usual Japanese sword movies, a genre
akin to U.S. westerns. Kenzi MIZOGUCHI is known for his stately period films
Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1955). Yoshiro Ozu's poetic studies of
modern domestic relations (Tokyo Story, 1953; An Autumn Afternoon, (1962)
introduced Western audiences to a personal sensitivity that was both intensely
national and universal. Younger directors, whose careers date from the postwar
burgeoning of the Japanese film, include Teinosuke Kinugasa (Gate of Hell,
1953), Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman of the Dunes, 1964, from a script by the
novelist ABE KOBO), Masahiro Shinoda (Under the Cherry Blossoms, 1975), Nagisa
Oshima (The Ceremony, 1971) and Musaki Kobayashi, best known for his nine-hour
trilogy on the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, The Human Condition (1959-61),
and Harakiri (1962), a deglamorization of the samurai tradition.^The film
industry in India, which ranks among the largest in the world, has produced
very little for international consumption. Its most famous director, Satyajit
RAY, vividly brings to life the problems of an India in transition, in
particular in the trilogy comprising Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956),
and The World of Apu (1958). Bengali is the language used in almost all Ray's
films. In 1977, however, he produced The Chess Players, with sound tracks in
both Hindi and English.
American Film Today
Throughout the 1960s and '70s, the American film industry accommodated itself
to the competition of this world market; to a film audience that had shrunk
from 80 million to 20 million weekly; to the tastes of a primarily young and
educated audience; and to the new social and sexual values sweeping the United
States and much of the rest of the industrialized world. The Hollywood studios
that have survived in name (Paramount, Warners, Universal, MGM, Fox) are today
primarily offices for film distribution. Many are subsidiaries of such huge
conglomerates as the Coca Cola Company or Gulf and Western. Increasingly,
major films are being shot in places other than Hollywood (New York City, for
example, is recovering its early status as a filmmaking center), and Hollywood
now produces far more television movies, series, and commercials than it does
motion pictures.^American movies of the past 20 years have moved more strongly
into social criticism (Doctor Strangelove, 1963; The Graduate, 1967; The
Godfather, 1971; One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1975; The Deer Hunter, 1978;
Norma Rae, 1979; Apocalypse Now, 1979; Missing, 1982); or they have offered an
escape from social reality into the realm of fantasy, aided by the often
beautiful, sometimes awesome effects produced by new film technologies (2001:
A Space Odyssey, 1968; Jaws, 1975; Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third
Kind, 1977; Altered States, 1979; E. T., 1982); or they have returned to
earnest or comic investigations of the dilemmas of everyday life (a troubled
family, in Ordinary People, 1980; divorce life and male parenting, in Kramer v.
Kramer, 1979; women in a male world, in Nine to Five, 1979, and Tootsie, 1982).
The most successful directors of the past 15 years--Stanley KUBRICK, Robert
ALTMAN, Francis Ford COPPOLA, Woody ALLEN, George LUCAS, and Steven
SPIELBERG--are those who have played most imaginatively with the tools of film
communication itself. The stars of recent years (with the exceptions of Paul
NEWMAN and Robert REDFORD) have, for their part, been more offbeat and less
glamorous than their predecessors of the studio era--Robert DE NIRO, Jane Fonda
(see FONDA FAMILY), Dustin HOFFMAN, Jack NICHOLSON, Al PACINO, and Meryl
STREEP.^The last two decades have seen the virtual extinction of animated film,
which is too expensive to make well, and the rebirth of U.S. documentary film
in the insightful work of Fred WISEMAN, the Maysles brothers, Richard Leacock
and Donn Pennebaker, and, in Europe, of Marcel OPHULS. Even richer is the
experimental, or underground, movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in which
filmmakers such as Stan BRAKHAGE, Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie, Hollis
Frampton, Michael Snow, and Robert Breer have worked as personally and
abstractly with issues of visual and psychological perception as have modern
painters and poets. The new vitality of these two opposite traditions--the one
devoted to revealing external reality, the other to revealing the life of the
mind--underscores the persistence of the dichotomy inherent in the film medium.
In the future, film will probably continue to explore these opposing
potentialities. Narrative films in particular will probably continue trends
that began with the French New Wave, experimenting with more elliptical ways of
telling film stories and either borrowing or rediscovering many of the images,
themes, and devices of the experimental film itself. GERALD MAST
Bibliography
Bibliography:GENERAL HISTORIES AND CRITICISM: Arnheim, Rudolf, Film as Art
(1957; repr. 1971); Bazin, Andre, What is Cinema?, 2 vols., trans. by Hugh
Gray (1967, 1971); Cook, David A., A History of Narrative Film, 1889-1979
(1981); Cowie, Peter, ed., Concise History of the Cinema, 2 vols. (1970);
Eisenstein, Sergei M., Film Form (1949; repr. 1969); Halliwell, Leslie,
Filmgoer's Companion, 6th ed. (1977); Jowett, Garth, Film: The Democratic Art
(1976); Kael, Pauline, Reeling (1976), and 5,000 Nights at the Movies: A Guide
from A to Z (1982); Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of
Physical Reality (1960); Mast, Gerald, A Short History of the Movies, 2d ed.
(1976); Mast, Gerald, and Cohen, Marshall, Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings (1974); Monaco, James, How to Read a Film (1977); Peary,
Danny, Cult Movies (1981); Robinson, David, The History of World Cinema
(1973).^ NATIONAL FILM HISTORIES: AMERICAN: Higham, Charles, The Art of
American Film, 1900-1971 (1973); Monaco, James, American Film Now: The People,
the Power, the Movies (1979); Sarris, Andrew, The American Cinema: Directors
and Directions, 1929-1968 (1968); Sklar, Robert, Movie-Made America
(1975).^AUSTRALIAN: Stratton, David, The Last New Wave: The Australian Film
Revival (1981).^BRITISH: Armes, Roy, A History of British Cinema (1978); Low,
Rachael, The History of British Film, 4 vols. (1973); Manvell, Roger, New
Cinema in Britain (1969).^FRENCH: Armes, Roy, The French Cinema Since 1946, 2
vols., rev. ed. (1970); Harvey, Sylvia, May '68 and Film Culture (rev. ed.,
1980); Monaco, James, The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette
(1976); Sadoul, Georges, French Film (1953; repr. 1972).^GERMAN: Barlow, John
D., German Expressionist Film (1982); Hull, David S., Film of the Third Reich:
A Study of the German Cinema, 1933-1945 (1969); Manvell, Roger, and Fraenkel,
Heinrich, The German Cinema (1971); Sandford, John The New German Cinema
(1980); Wollenberg, H. H., Fifty Years of German Film (1948; repr.
1972).^ITALIAN: Jarratt, Vernon, Italian Cinema (1951; repr. 1972); Leprohon,
Pierre, The Italian Cinema (1972); Rondi, Gian, Italian Cinema Today (1965);
Witcombe, Roger, The New Italian Cinema (1982).^JAPANESE: Mellen, Joan, The
Waves at Genji's Door: Japan Through Its Cinema (1976); Richie, Donald, The
Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965), and The Japanese Movie: An Illustrated History
(1966); Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema (1982).^RUSSIAN: Cohen, Louis
H., The Cultural-Political Traditions and Development of the Soviet Cinema,
1917-1972 (1974); Dickenson, Thorold, and De La Roche, Catherine, Soviet Cinema
(1948; repr. 1972); Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet
Film (1960; repr. 1973); Taylor, Richard, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and
Nazi Germany (1979).^SWEDISH: Cowie, Peter, Swedish Cinema (1966); Donner,
Jorn, The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman (1964); Hardy, Forsyth, The
Scandinavian Film (1952; repr. 1972).
Porter, Cole
--------------------------------
Cole Porter, b. Peru, Ind., June 9, 1892, d. Oct. 15, 1964, was an American
lyricist and composer of popular songs for stage and screen. A graduate of
Yale College, he attended Harvard School of Arts and Sciences for 2 years and
later studied under the French composer Vincent d'Indy. Both his lyrics and
music have a witty sophistication, technical virtuosity, and exquisite sense of
style that have rarely been paralleled in popular music. He contributed
brilliant scores to numerous Broadway musicals, such as Anything Goes (1934)
and Kiss Me, Kate (1948), and to motion pictures. His best songs have become
classics; these include "Begin the Beguine," "Night and Day," and "I Love
Paris." DAVID EWEN
Bibliography: Eells, George, The Life that Late He Led: A Biography of Cole
Porter (1967); Kimball, Robert, ed., Cole (1971); Schwartz, Charles, Cole Porter
(1977).
Griffith, D. W.
--------------------------------
David Lewelyn Wark Griffith, b. La Grange, Ky., Jan. 23, 1875, d. July 23,
1948, is recognized as the greatest single film director and most consistently
innovative artist of the early American film industry. His influence on the
development of cinema was worldwide.
After gaining experience with a Louisville stock company, he was employed as an
actor and writer by the Biograph Film Company of New York in 1907. The
following year he was offered a director-producer contract and, for the next
five years, oversaw the production of more than 400 one- and two-reel films.
As his ideas grew bolder, however, he felt increasingly frustrated by the
limitations imposed by his employers. Griffith left Biograph in 1913 to join
Reliance-Majestic as head of production, and in 1914, he began his most famous
film, based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon. This Civil War
Reconstruction epic, known as The Birth of a Nation (1915), became a landmark
in American filmmaking, both for its artistic merits and for its unprecedented
use of such innovative techniques as flashbacks, fade-outs, and close-ups. The
film was harshly condemned, however, for its racial bias and glorification of
the Ku Klux Klan; several subsequent lynchings were blamed on the film. In
response to this criticism, Griffith made what many consider his finest film,
Intolerance (1916), in which the evils of intolerance were depicted in four
parallel stories--a framework that required a scope of vision and production
never before approached. Although Griffith made numerous other films up to
1931, none ranked with his first two classics. Among the best of these later
efforts were Hearts of the World (1918); Broken Blossoms (1919), released by
his own newly formed corporation, United Artists; Way Down East (1920); Orphans
of the Storm (1922); America (1924); Isn't Life Wonderful? (1924); and Abraham
Lincoln (1930). Of the many actors trained by Griffith and associated with his
name, Mary PICKFORD, Dorothy and Lillian GISH, and Lionel Barrymore (see
BARRYMORE family) are the most famous. In 1935, Griffith was honored by the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a special award.
Bibliography: Barry, Iris, D. W. Griffith, American Film Master (1940);
Brown, Karl, Adventures with D. W. Griffith (1976); Geduld, Harry M., ed.,
Focus on D. W. Griffith (1971); Gish, Lillian, Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr.
Griffith and Me (1969); Henderson, Robert M., D. W. Griffith: His Life and
Work (1972) and D. W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph (1970); O'Dell, Paul,
Griffith and the Rise of Hollywood (1970); Wagenknecht, Edward C., The Films of
D. W. Griffith (1975).
film industry
--------------------------------
The first four decades of the film age (roughly 1908-48) saw the increasing
concentration of control in the hands of a few giant Hollywood concerns. Since
the late 1940s, however, that trend has been reversed; the monolithic studio
system has given way to independent production and diversification at all
levels of the industry.^Although in the silent era small, independent producers
were common, by the 1930s, in the so-called golden age of Hollywood, the
overwhelming majority of films were produced, distributed, and exhibited by one
of the large California studios. Led by M-G-M, Paramount, RKO,
20th-Century-Fox, Warner Brothers, Columbia, and Universal, the industry
enjoyed the benefits of total vertical integration: because the studios owned
their own theater chains, they could require theater managers to charge fixed
minimum admission rates, to purchase groups of pictures rather than single
releases ("block booking"), and to accept films without first previewing them
("blind buying"). For more than two decades the major studios completely
controlled their contracted stars, managed vast indoor and outdoor studio sets,
and in general profited from what amounted to a virtual monopoly of the
industry.^Shortly after World War II, three factors contributed to the loss of
the majors' hegemony. First, a number of federal court decisions forced the
studios to end discriminatory distribution practices, including block booking,
blind selling, and the setting of fixed admission prices; in 1948 the Supreme
Court ordered divestiture of their theater chains. Second, the House Committee
on Un-American Activities investigated the industry, which responded by
blacklisting several prominent screenwriters and directors--an action that
called into question the industry's reliability as a promoter of unfettered
creative talent. Third, television began to deprive Hollywood of large
segments of its audience, and the industry reacted timidly and late to the
possibilities for diversification presented by the new medium.^The effects of
these developments were immediate and long lasting. Weekly attendance figures
fell from 80 million in 1946 to just over 12 million by 1972. Box-ofice
revenues in the same period dropped from $1.75 billion to $1.4 billion--and
this despite constant inflation and admission prices that were often 10 times
the prewar average. The movie colony experienced unprecedented unemployment.
The number of films made yearly declined from an average of 445 in the 1940s to
under 150 in the 1970s, as the industry sought solvency in "blockbusters"
rather than in the solid but unspectacular products that had brought it a mass
audience before the age of television. Between 1948 and 1956 the number of
U.S. theaters fell from 20,000 to 10,000, and although 4,000 new drive-in
theaters somewhat offset this attrition, by the mid-1970s less than half of the
American spectator's amusement dollar was being spent on movies; in the 1940s
the yearly average had been over 80 cents.^By the late 1960s the major studios
had entered a grave economic slump, for many of their "big picture" gambles
fell through. In 1970, 20th-Century-Fox lost $36 million, and United Artists,
which as the industry leader had more to lose, ended up more than $50 million
in the red. In response to this devastation of its profits, the industry
underwent a profound reorganization. Following the 1951 lead of United
Artists, the majors backed away from production (since its cost had contributed
heavily to their decline) and restructured themselves as loan guarantors and
distributors. At the same time, most of them became subsidiaries of
conglomerates such as Gulf and Western, Kinney National Service, and
Transamerica and began to look to television sales and recording contracts for
the revenues that previously had come from the theater audience alone.^In
setting up these new contractual relationships the independent producer played
a central role. Such a figure, who by now has replaced the old studio mogul as
the industry's driving force, brings together the various properties associated
with a film (including actors, a director, and book rights) to create a
"package" often financed independently but distributed by a film company in
exchange for a share of the rental receipts. Working with the conglomerates
and accepting the reality of a permanently reduced market, these private
promoters have partially succeeded in revitalizing the industry.^The rise of
independent production has been accompanied by diversification of subject
matter, with close attention to the interests of specialized audiences. This
trend, which began in the 1950s as an attempt to capture the "art house"
audience and the youth market, is evident today in the success of martial-arts,
rock-music, pornographic, documentary, and black-culture films.
Simultaneously, production has moved away from the Hollywood sets and toward
location filming. For many producers, New York City has become the New
filmmakers' mecca, while shooting in foreign countries, where cheap labor is
often plentiful, has given the modern film a new international texture; foreign
markets have also become increasingly important. Both geographically and
financially, therefore, the film industry has begun to recapture some of the
variety and independence that were common in the days before studio control.
THADDEUS F. TULEJA
Bibliography: Balio, Tino, ed., The American Film Industry (1976); Brownlow,
Kevin, Hollywood: The Pioneers (1980); David, Saul, The Industry: Life in the
Hollywood Fast Lane (1981); Phillips, Gene D., The Movie Makers: Artists in an
Industry (1973); Stanley, Robert H., The Celluloid Empire (1978).
Table: TEN TOP-GROSSING FILMS
--------------------------------
TEN TOP-GROSSING FILMS (as of Jan. 1, 1984)
---------------------------------------------------------
Film Year Gross Earnings*
---------------------------------------------------------
1. E.T. The ExtraTerrestrial 1982 $209,567,000
2. Star Wars 1977 193,500,000
3. Return of the Jedi 1983 165,500,000
4. The Empire Strikes Back 1980 141,600,000
5. Jaws 1975 133,435,000
6. Raiders of the Lost Ark 1981 115,598,000
7. Grease 1978 96,300,000
8. Tootsie 1982 94,571,613
9. The Exorcist 1973 89,000,000
10. The Godfather 1972 86,275,000
---------------------------------------------------------
SOURCE: Variety (1984). *Distributors' percentage has been subtracted.
Sennett, Mack
--------------------------------
(sen'-et)
A pioneer of slapstick film comedy, Mack Sennett, b. Michael Sinnott,
Richmond, Quebec, Jan. 17, 1880, d. Nov. 5, 1960, was an uneducated
Irish-Canadian who drifted into films as D. W. Griffith's apprentice. In
1912 he started his own comedy studio, called Keystone, where he developed the
Keystone Kops and discovered such major talents as Charlie Chaplin and Frank
Capra. With the advent of sound films, comedy shorts became less popular, and
in the 1930s Sennett, who failed to change with the times, lost his entire
fortune. Sennett is, however, still remembered as Hollywood's "King of Comedy"
and received a special Academy Award in 1937 for his contribution to cinema
comedy. LEONARD MALTIN
Bibliography: Fowler, Gene, Father Goose (1934; repr. 1974); Lahue, Kalton C.,
and Brewer, Terry, Kops and Custards: The Legend of Keystone Films (1968);
Sennett, Mack, King of Comedy (1954; repr. 1975).
Chaplin, Charlie
--------------------------------
Charles Spencer Chaplin, b. Apr. 16, 1889, d. Dec. 25, 1977, cinema's most
celebrated comedian-director, achieved international fame with his portrayals
of the mustachioed Little Tramp. As the director, producer, writer, and
interpreter of his many movies, he made a major contribution to establishing
film comedy as a true art form. Reared in poverty in London's slums, Chaplin,
like his parents, became a music hall performer, appearing as a clown in Fred
Karno's Mumming Birds company from 1906. While touring the United States in
1913, Mack SENNETT persuaded him to join his Keystone studio; Chaplin's first
slapstick, Making a Living (1914), followed. In Kid Auto Races at Venice
(1914), he originated the gentleman tramp routine--twirling cane, bowler, tight
jacket, and baggy pants--that became his trademark in dozens of two-reelers.
He also learned to direct his own short films.
During the next four years, Chaplin consolidated his growing international
reputation by a prolific output of shorts for Essanay, Mutual, and First
National studios. At the same time, he refined his tramp character into a
poetic figure that combined comedy and pathos, yet retained his meticulously
timed acrobatic skills. His films grew in length and subtlety with A Dog's
Life and Shoulder Arms (both 1918). After cofounding United Artists in 1919,
Chaplin began independent production of his best feature-length films in the
1920s: A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City
Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940), his first
all-talking film, in which he abandoned the tramp to parody Hitler. Among his
later films, only the poignant Limelight (1952) achieved popularity; the
apparent cynicism of Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and A King in New York (1957)
alienated audiences, while his last effort, A Countess from Hong Kong (1966),
left little impression.
Although loved and appreciated throughout the world as the inimitable Charlot
or Charlie, Chaplin's personal life, including his four marriages, a 1944
paternity suit, and his refusal to accept U.S. citizenship, gained him adverse
publicity in America. In 1953, accused of Communist sympathies, he was denied
reentry into the country. Thereafter, he settled in Switzerland with his wife
Oona O'Neill, surrounded by luxury and a family of nine children. Initially
embittered by his rejection in the United States, he returned in triumph in
1972 to receive a special achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, followed in 1973 by an Academy Award for his score to
Limelight. In 1975, at age 86, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Chaplin's
My Autobiography appeared in 1964, and a filmed biography, The Gentleman Tramp,
in 1978. ROGER MANVELL
Bibliography: Chaplin, Charles, My Life in Pictures (1975); Hu ff, Theodore,
Charlie Chaplin (1951; repr. 1972); Manvell, Roger, Chaplin (1973); McCabe,
John, Charlie Chaplin (1978); Tyler, Parker, Last of the Clowns (1947; repr.
1972).
Pickford, Mary
--------------------------------
(pik'-furd)
Mary Pickford, stage name of Gladys Mary Smith, b. Toronto, Apr. 8, 1893, d.
May 29, 1979, became one of the world's first film stars after beginning her
cinema career in 1909 under the tutelage of D. W. Griffith. Together with
her second husband, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin, she founded United
Artists in 1919. Despite considerable business acumen, her career faltered
with the advent of talkies. Her best-known films include Rebecca of Sunnybrook
Farm (1917), Pollyanna (1920), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921), and Little Annie
Rooney (1925). She received an Academy Award for Coquette (1929) and a special
Academy Award in 1976.
Bibliography: Pickford, Mary, Sunshine and Shadow (1955); Windeler, Robert,
Sweetheart (1974).
Hart, William S.
--------------------------------
William S. Hart, b. Newburgh, N.Y., Dec. 6, 1870, d. June 23, 1946, was a
top box-office draw in American silent films, especially in Westerns. His
dour, commanding presence had the same kind of appeal found years later in
Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson. The Return of Draw Egan (1916), The Toll
Gate (1920), Travellin' On (1922), Wild Bill Hickok (1923), and Tumbleweeds
(1925) were among Hart's most popular films. LESLIE HALLIWELL
film serials
--------------------------------
Film serials, the bulk of which were produced in Hollywood between 1913 and the
late 1940s, were interrupted melodramas or mysteries ("cliffhangers") that
typically consisted of 12 to 15 episodes varying in length from 18 to 30
minutes. Up to 1930, approximately 300 silent serials appeared--the first was
The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913), the most popular was Pathe's The Perils of
Pauline (1914), starring Pearl White. At least a part of their charm derived
from carefully timed dramatic sequences that substituted for a lack of
narrative depth. Among the best-known serials of the sound era, during which
Westerns, space stories, and other fantasy-oriented fare dominated, were The
Lone Ranger, Captain Video, Flash Gordon, Zorro, The Masked Marvel, and The
Green Hornet. BRUCE BERMAN
Bibliography: Barbour, Alan G., Cliffhanger (1977) and Serial Showcase (1968);
Lahue, Kalton C., Bound and Gagged (1968) and Continued Next Week (1964);
Stedman, Raymond W., The Serials, 2d ed. (1977).
Arbuckle, Fatty
--------------------------------
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, b. Mar. 24, 1887, d. June 29, 1933, was one of the
movies' first comedy stars. His boyish face, ample girth, and acrobatic skill
made him a natural comic in silent films. After achieving stardom at Mack
Sennett's studio, he went on to write, direct, and star in his own films. His
on-screen career was ruined by a 1921 scandal involving the death of a young
woman. Although cleared of manslaughter charges, Arbuckle was unable to work
again in films except as a writer-director in 1931-32, using the pseudonym
William Goodrich. LEONARD MALTIN
Bibliography: Maltin, Leonard, The Great Movie Comedians (1978); Yallop,
David, The Day the Laughter Stopped (1976).
Mayer, Louis B.
--------------------------------
(may'-ur)
Louis Burt Mayer, b. Minsk, Russia, 1882 or 1885, d. Oct. 29, 1957, was a
Hollywood film mogul who for many years headed the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Corporation, ruling his studio like a patriarch in order to make "decent,
wholesome pictures for Americans." Initially a scrap-metal dealer, he made a
fortune as a New England movie-theater owner before forming the Louis B. Mayer
Pictures Corporation in 1918. Merging his company with Marcus Loew's Metro and
the Goldwyn Company to found MGM in 1924, he became vice-president of the new
company, acting as general manager of the Culver City studio until forced to
retire in 1951.
Bibliography: Crowther, Bosley, Hollywood Rajah (1960); Marx, Samuel, Mayer
and Thalberg: The Make-Believe Saints (1975).
Muybridge, Eadweard
--------------------------------
(my'-brij, ed'-wurd)
The Englishman Eadweard Muybridge, b. Edward James Muggeridge, Apr 9, 1830, d.
May 8, 1904, one of the great photographers of the American West, became even
better known for his pioneering photographic studies of motion. Photographing
throughout California in the 1860s and '70s, he made the large, impressive
landscapes of the Yosemite wilderness that won him initial fame. In 1872,
Leland Stanford, the former governor of the state, bet a friend that once in
every stride all four legs of a running horse were simultaneously off the
ground. He hired Muybridge to settle the bet, and in 1877 Muybridge's
pictures, which recorded the horse's motion in sequential frames, proved
Stanford right. (The work took 5 years because it was interrupted while
Muybridge was tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife's lover.) In 1879,
Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope, a machine that reconstructed motion from
his photographs and a forerunner of cinematography. After a European tour,
during which his work was acclaimed by artists and scientists alike, he
continued (1884-86) his photographic motion studies; Animal Locomotion (1887),
containing 781 groups of sequential frames, was the first of several such
publications, which also included The Human Figure in Motion (1901). PETER
GALASSI
Bibliography: Muybridge, Eadweard, Descriptive Zoopraxography (1893) and Animals
in Motion (1899, repr. 1957); Hendricks, Gordon, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father
of the Motion Picture (1975); Mozley, A. V., Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford
Years, 1872-1882 (1972).
Eakins, Thomas
--------------------------------
(ay'-kinz)
Although he received little recognition in his lifetime, Thomas Cowperthwaite
Eakins, b. July 25, 1844, d. June 25, 1916, has come to be regarded in the
20th century as the greatest realist in the history of American art. He was
born in Philadelphia, where he received his early training and later spent his
adult life. From 1866 to 1869 he was a pupil of Jean Leon GEROME at the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and in 1870 he visited Spain and was strongly
influenced by the works of Diego VELAZQUEZ and Jusepe de RIBERA. He became an
uncompromising realist, bringing to his work a close personal involvement with
his subjects and intense scientific interest in anatomy, light, and
perspective.
After his return to Philadelphia in 1870, Eakins painted outdoor scenes that
included views of sportsmen on rivers and bays near the city, such as Max
Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871; Metropolitan Museum, New York City). In 1875
he painted a far more ambitious picture, now accepted as his masterpiece, a
large portrait of the eminent surgeon Dr. Samuel Gross, The Gross Clinic
(1875; Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia). Gross is shown scalpel in
hand, lecturing to his students about the operation he is performing, the
details of which, including an open incision, are clearly depicted. The
painting's bold realism appropriately reflects the clinical objectivity of Dr.
Gross's approach to medicine, but offended Eakins's prudish audience.
Eakins taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1876 to 1886, when
he was forced to resign after a dispute caused by his insistence that students
of both sexes be allowed to draw from nude models. He continued to teach
privately, and one of his most accomplished students, Susan Macdowell, became
his wife in 1884. During the 1880s, Eakins conducted photographic experiments
at the University of Pennsylvania into the movement of human bodies that
anticipated the invention of the motion picture and coincided with the
pioneering work of Eadweard MUYBRIDGE. After 1880 most of his works were
portraits, often of the scientists, physicians, scholars, and students of
Philadelphia who were his friends. He had little commercial success and was
largely ignored by the art world despite the fact that he was an outstanding
figure painter and the best portraitist in America since Gilbert STUART, whose
work was much narrower in scope. In 1902 he was belatedly elected to the
National Academy of Design, by which time his creative powers had begun to
wane. After 1910 he was in ill health and ceased to paint. His influence on
the so-called ASHCAN SCHOOL realists of the early 20th century was great,
although full recognition of his many achievements as an artist and teacher
came only in the 1930s.
Among Eakins's finest paintings is William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure
of the Schuylkill (1877; Philadelphia Museum of Art), a subject to which he
returned late in his career. (William RUSH was a Philadelphia wood-carver of
the Federal period whose use of a nude model aroused a controversy of the kind
that Eakins was often involved in.) The psychological penetration of his
portraits is evident in the mirthful spirit of his Walt Whitman (1888;
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts) and the introspective serenity of Miss Van
Buren (c.1891; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.).
Eakins also worked as a sculptor, and his contributions to the art of
photography are also notable, but his paintings were his supreme achievement.
Along with those of his contemporary Winslow HOMER, they represent the
culmination of the development of American art in the 19th century. DAVID
TATHAM
Bibliography: Goodrich, Lloyd, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work (1933; repr.
1970); Hendricks, Gordon, The Life and Works of Thomas Eakins (1974); Schendler,
Sylvan, Eakins (1967); Siegl, Theodor, The Thomas Eakins Collection (1978).
Hays, Will
--------------------------------
William Harrison Hays, b. Sullivan, Ind., Nov. 5, 1879, d. Mar. 7, 1954,
was for many years the censor of the U.S. film industry. He served as
chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1918 to 1921 and was
postmaster general under President Warren G. Harding in 1921-22. From 1922 to
1945, Hays was president of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors. In
1934 that association implemented a system of self-censorship, the so-called
Production Code, that came to be known as the Hays Code.
Lloyd, Harold
--------------------------------
(loyd)
Harold Lloyd, b. Burchard, Nebr., Apr. 20, 1893, d. Mar. 8, 1971, was one
of the most popular screen comedians of the 1920s, a living symbol of the shy
but optimistic all-American boy. This ingratiating character started evolving
in the short subjects Lloyd made during the second decade of the 20th century,
but crystallized only after he became a major star in such 1920s silent feature
films as Grandma's Boy (1922) and The Freshman (1925). Lloyd's trademarks were
a straw hat and horn-rimmed glasses, but he is perhaps even better remembered
for the "thrill comedy" of films like Safety Last (1923), in which he scales
the side of a building. Snippets from his many early films appeared in two
1963 screen compilations: Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy and Harold Lloyd's
Funny Side of Life. His methodical, unpretentious approach to comedy received
wider attention after his "rediscovery" in the 1970s. LEONARD MALTIN
Bibliography: Lloyd, Harold, An American Comedy (1928; repr. 1971); Maltin,
Leonard, The Great Movie Comedians (1978); Reilly, Adam, Harold Lloyd: The King
of Daredevil Comedy (1977); Schickel, Richard, Harold Lloyd: The Shape of
Keaton, Buster
--------------------------------
(keet'-uhn)
Joseph Francis "Buster" Keaton, b. Piqua, Kans., Oct. 4, 1895, d. Feb. 1,
1966, actor and director, was one of the giants of silent film comedy. Raised
in a vaudeville family, Keaton entered the film industry in 1917 as a protege
of Fatty Arbuckle and quickly mastered film technique on both sides of the
camera. A superb acrobat from youth, Keaton developed both a keen appreciation
for movie sight gags and the perfectionist's desire to execute them without
flaw. In 1921, under the banner of his own company, he began his solo starring
career and refined his unique deadpan character--a loner caught in the flurry
of modern life who somehow manages to triumph over even the most mind-boggling
disasters. Such classic shorts as One Week (1920), The High Sign (1921), The
Boat (1921), Cops (1922), and The Balloonatic (1923) led to feature films in
which he expanded his highly individual comic views: Our Hospitality (1923),
The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1926), and his
cinematic tour de force, Sherlock Jr. (1924). Bad business advice coupled
with personal problems sabotaged his career in the early 1930s. He continued
to work in films and television the rest of his life, but after his move to MGM
in 1928, he never again exercised the creative control he had enjoyed in the
silent era. His memoirs, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, appeared in 1960.
LEONARD MALTIN
Bibliography: Anobile, Richard J., ed., The Best of Buster (1976); Blesh,
Rudi, Keaton (1966); Dardis, Tom, Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down
(1979); Maltin, Leonard, The Great Movie Comedians (1978); Moews, Daniel,
Keaton: The Silent Features Close Up (1977); Wead, George, and Lellis, George,
eds., The Film Career of Buster Keaton (1977).
Lubitsch, Ernst
--------------------------------
(loo'-bich, airnst)
Ernst Lubitsch, b. Berlin, Jan. 28, 1892, d. Nov. 30, 1947, was a
German-American film director known for his sophisticated comedies of manners.
He had already achieved success as an actor and director in Europe when Mary
Pickford brought him to Hollywood to direct her in Rosita (1923); Lubitsch's
subsequent silent films--The Marriage Circle (1924), Forbidden Paradise (1924),
Lady Windermere's Fan (1925), and So This Is Paris (1926)--established his
reputation as a master of urbane, sardonic humor.
The "Lubitsch touch" survived the transition to sound. In the 1930s, beginning
with The Love Parade (1930), he directed musicals, often using the team of
Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. The cynical wit that was his
trademark was especially evident in Trouble in Paradise (1932); Ninotchka
(1939), starring Greta Garbo; and To Be Or Not To Be (1942), which satirized
Nazism. He departed from his usual brand of humor in The Shop around the
Corner (1940), another comedy directed at the Nazi threat.
Bibliography: Poague, Leland A., The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch (1978); Weinberg,
Herman G., The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study (1968).
animation
--------------------------------
Film animation applies techniques of cinematography to the graphic and plastic
arts in order to give the illusion of life and movement to cartoons, drawings,
paintings, puppets, and three-dimensional objects. Beginning with crude and
simple methods, animation has become a highly sophisticated form of filmmaking,
involving the use of automation, computer, and even laser technology to achieve
its effects. Some animation techniques overlap with those used to produce
special effects in live-action cinematography. In watching such films as
2001--A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977), a person often finds it
difficult to tell whether a certain result has been achieved through animation
or through special effects.
ANIMATION TECHNIQUES
Basic graphic animation is produced by a technique called stop-frame
cinematography. The camera records, frame by frame, a sequence or succession
of drawings or paintings that differ only fractionally from one another. The
illusion of progressive movement is created by projecting the series of frames
through a camera at the normal rate for sound film (24 frames a second). The
same method is used in puppet or object animation; the position of the figures
or objects is changed very slightly prior to each exposure. In graphic
animation, the drawings may vary from the simplest outlines, as in such
traditional animated films as Felix the Cat, to elaborately modeled and colored
paintings, such as those produced in Walt DISNEY's studios during the 1930s.
The first animated cartoons were produced before 1910 by pioneers such as Emile
Cohl of France and Winsor McCay of the United States, whose Sinking of the
Lusitania (1918) has been called the first animated feature film. In these
early productions, a simple drawing of a mobile figure was photographed against
an equally simple background, and a new drawing was required for each exposure.
Relief from the labor of drawing hundreds of pictures for each minute of action
came only when the figures could be made momentarily static. The evolution of
cel (for celluloid) animation after 1913 enabled animators to use a single,
more elaborate background for each shot or scene in the action. The mobile
figures in the foreground were inked in black silhouette on transparent
celluloid sheets and then superimposed in series on the background. With the
introduction of color filming early in the 1930s, animators began to use opaque
paints in place of black ink. Greater efficiency was achieved when artists
began to specialize in particular figures or other mobile elements of cartoons.
Such teams of animators collectively created drawings for feature-length films,
for example, Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Fantasia
(1940). Most animated films are recorded by an automated rostrum camera. The
many improvements made in this camera since the 1950s have contributed to the
increased technical capabilities of the medium. The adjustable camera is
suspended above the horizontal table on which the combination of cels, one upon
the other, have been superimposed on the background and locked or pegged into
position. The cels are then successively photographed to produce a precision
image offering a faultless illusion of movement. Such cinematic effects as
tracking, panning, and zooming may also be achieved.
HISTORY OF ANIMATION
Since the early, popular shorts involving such animals as Felix the Cat and
Mickey Mouse, the international history of animation has been characterized by
the almost constant introduction of ever more complex forms. Many advances
were made in Europe: Lotte Reiniger employed mobile silhouettes; Oskar
FISCHINGER and Len Lye experimented with abstract designs choreographed to
music; and George Pal of Holland created techniques of puppet animation. Since
World War II, animation was increasingly used in instructional films and in
television and cinema commercials. Advanced forms of graphic design, both in
black and white and in color, and new methods of puppet and object animation
have been developed. From the 1940s until the early 1980s, Norman MCLAREN, one
of the versatile of all animators, experimented with three-dimensional
animation and with other innovations as drawing images directly on film.
Beginning in the 1960s, films showing abstract color designs in motion were
programmed by means of computers that calculate intricate movements with
amazing precision. Today, computer animation has achieved the ability to
create moving images and backgrounds of great complexity. The basic tool,
usually called a PAINTBOX, is an electronic surface on which the artist draws
figures and backgrounds and selects colors. Other devices manipulate the
figures and change the backgrounds. The work is reproduced on a TV monitor and
stored on a computer disk. Computerized animation is widely used in television
commercials, titles, and in making music videos (see VIDEO, MUSIC), and
provides many of the special effects in the films of directors like George
Lucas (see COMPUTER GRAPHICS, VIDEO ART).
Old-style cel animation continues to be the sole technique by which quality
animators, such as Disney Productions, create their characters. Backgrounds,
and the movement of objects within a scene, however, are often
computer-generated.
Television, with its insatiable need for new material, introduced a type of
semianimation in its cartoon programs for children. Compared with traditional
animation, on television the movement of characters is primitive in its
rendition, colors are limited, and detail is stripped down to bare essentials.
The cost of an animated minute on television is one-tenth the cost of a Disney
minute; $10,000 to $100,000 or more. Disney's The Black Cauldron (1985) cost
about $30 million and was nine years in the making.
International animation film festivals, where the latest work is displayed, are
annual events in Europe. ROGER MANVELL
Bibliography
Bibliography: Feild, Robert Durant, The Art of Walt Disney (1942); Fox, D.,
and Waite, M., Computer Animation Primer (1984); Halas, John, ed., Computer
Animation (1974); Halas, John, and Manvell, Roger, Art in Movement: New
Directions in Animation (1970), Design in Motion (1962), and The Technique of
Film Animation, 3d ed. (1971); Rubin, S., Animation: The Art and the Industry
(1984); Stephenson, Ralph, Animation in the Cinema (1967); Thomas, F., and
Johnstone, O., Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (1981).
Edison, Thomas Alva
--------------------------------
Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most prolific inventors of the late 19th
century. He is most famous for his development of the first commercially
practical incandescent lamp (1879). Perhaps his greatest contribution,
however, was the development (1882) of the world's first central electric
light-power station. His early laboratories were forerunners of the modern
industrial research laboratory, where skilled researchers jointly solve
technological problems.^Edison was born in the village of Milan, Ohio, on Feb.
11, 1847, and his family later moved to Port Huron, Mich. His formal schooling
was limited to three months, at the age of seven, but thereafter his mother
tutored him, and he was an avid reader. At age 12 he became a train-boy,
selling magazines and candy on the Grand Trunk Railroad. He spent all he
earned on books and apparatus for his chemical laboratory. An accident at
about this time eventually led to a loss of hearing.^A station agent taught him
telegraph code and procedures, and at age 15 Edison became manager of a
telegraph office. His first inventions were the transmitter and receiver for
the automatic telegraph. At 21, Edison produced his first major invention, a
stock ticker for printing stock-exchange quotations in brokers' offices. With
the $40,000 he was paid for improvements in tickers, he established a
manufacturing shop and a small laboratory in Newark, N.J. Deciding to give up
manufacturing, he moved the laboratory to Menlo Park, N.J., where he directed
groups of employees working on various projects. The original Menlo Park
facility is now at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.^In 1878, Edison
began work on an electric lamp and sought a material that could be electrically
heated to incandescence in a vacuum. At first he used platinum wire in glass
bulbs at 10 volts. He connected these bulbs in series to utilize a higher
supply voltage; however, he realized that independent lamp control would be
necessary for home and office use. He then developed a three-wire system with
a supply of 220 volts. Each lamp operated at 110 volts, and the higher voltage
required a resistance greater than that of platinum. Edison conducted an
extensive search for a filament material to replace platinum until, on Oct.
21, 1879, he demonstrated a lamp containing a carbonized cotton thread that
glowed for 40 hours.^Edison installed the first large central power station on
Pearl Street in New York City in 1882; its steam-driven generators of 900
horsepower provided enough power for 7,200 lamps. The success of this station
led to the construction of many other central stations. Edison founded The
Edison Electric Light Company (1878), which eventually merged with other
companies into the General Electric Company (1892), one of the largest U.S.
manufacturers. He consistently opposed, however, switching the power stations
from direct current to alternating current, a change that would have increased
transmission voltages considerably.^During his experiments on the incandescent
bulb, Edison noted a flow of electricity from a hot filament across a vacuum to
a metal wire. This phenomenon, known as THERMIONIC EMISSION, or the Edison
effect, was the foundation of electronic inventions of the 20th century.^Edison
also invented (1877) the PHONOGRAPH, the invention he was most proud of; it
used tinfoil and wax cylinders to record the sound. His introduction of
flexible celluloid film and his invention of the movie projector aided the
development of motion pictures (see FILM, HISTORY OF). His other inventions
include the alkaline storage battery, a magnetic process to separate iron ore,
and the carbon microphone. After World War I he became interested in domestic
sources of rubber and investigated various plant species for rubber content.
By the time he died at West Orange, N.J., on Oct. 18, 1931, he had patented
over 1,000 inventions. J. D. RYDER
Bibliography: Clark, Ronald W., Edison: The Man Who Made the Future (1977);
Josephson, Matthew, Edison: A Biography (1959; repr. 1963); Silverberg,
Robert, Light for the World (1967); Wachhorst, Wyn, Thomas Alva Edison: an
American Myth (1981).
Chaney, Lon
--------------------------------
(chay'-nee)
Lon Chaney, b. Apr. 1, 1883, d. Aug. 26, 1930, Hollywood's "man of a
thousand faces," was a leading character actor specializing in macabre roles.
His ability to mime, to change physical appearance, and skill with makeup
served him well in such films as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The
Phantom of the Opera (1925). LESLIE HALLIWELL
Bibliography: Andersen, Robert Gordon, Faces, Forms, Films: The Artistry of
Lon Chaney (1971).
Fischinger, Oskar
--------------------------------
(fish'-ing-ur)
The German animator Oskar Fischinger, b. July 22, 1900, d. Jan. 31, 1967,
made films that used abstract forms to interpret music. Examples are the
numbered series Studien 1-12 (1925-36), An American March (1940), and Motion
Painting No. 1 (1947). Fischinger also created special effects for Hollywood
films and invented the lumigraph light-producing device (1951).
Minnelli, Vincente
--------------------------------
The Hollywood director whose name is most often associated with the most
imaginative musicals of the 1940s and 1950s is Vincente Minnelli, b. Chicago,
Feb. 28, 1913. Beginning with Cabin in the Sky in 1943, Minnelli set new
standards for the musical genre with such films as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
and The Pirate (1948) both starring his then wife Judy GARLAND, An American in
Paris (1951), The Band Wagon (1953), and Gigi (1958), which won nine Academy
Awards. The visual dynamism and stylish decor of these films can also be seen
in such nonmusical Minnelli efforts as The Clock (1945), The Bad and the
Beautiful (1952), and Designing Woman (1957). His and Garland's daughter is
the performer Liza Minnelli (see MINNELLI, LIZA). His autobiography, I
Remember It Well, appeared in 1974. WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Casper, Joseph, Vincente Minnelli and the Film Musical (197
7).
Kelly, Gene
--------------------------------
A dancer, singer, and actor whose cheerful manner and innovative dance
sequences enlivened some of Hollywood's most memorable musicals, Gene Kelly, b.
Eugene Curran Kelly, Pittsburgh, Pa., Aug. 23, 1912, turned choreography into
a virile, athletic American art. Synthesizing ballet with the tattoo of tap,
the rhythms of jazz, and a sense of fun and grace, he was at his best in The
Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Singin' in the
Rain (1952), and Brigadoon (1954). Kelly has also directed films, including
Hello Dolly (1969), and was a principal in the MGM reprises That's
Entertainment (1974), That's Entertainment Part Two (1976), and That's Dancing
(1985). He won the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement award in
1985. ELEANOR M. GATES
Bibliography: Hirschhorn, Clive, Gene Kelly: A Biography (1975); Thomas, Tony,
Films of Gene Kelly (1974).
Vigo, Jean
--------------------------------
Jean Vigo, b. Apr. 26, 1905, d. Oct. 5, 1934, in spite of his tragically
short life, proved himself one of the great French filmmakers. The son of a
celebrated anarchist who was later murdered in prison, Vigo led a disordered
childhood. A Propos de Nice (About Nice, 1930) is a short, personal film essay
mixing sharp observation and adroit camera technique. His two major films,
Zero de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933) and L'Atalante (Atalanta, 1934), were
both commercial disasters, and at the time of his death at the age of 29, Vigo
remained almost unknown. His tiny output, however, now ranks as one of the
great achievements of French cinema. His work draws uniquely sensitive
pictures of private worlds (those of a group of schoolboys and a newly married
couple, respectively), combining a respect for reality with virtually
surrealist imagery. ROY ARMES
Bibliography: Sales Gomes, P. E., Jean Vigo (1972); Smith, John M., Jean Vigo
(1972).
Carne, Marcel
--------------------------------
(kahr-nay')
The French film director Marcel Carne, b. Aug. 18, 1909, achieved fame in the
1930s when he worked with the poet Jacques Prevert on such classics as Quai des
brumes (Misty Quay, 1938) and Le Jour se leve (Day Begins, 1939), both starring
Jean Gabin. Carne learned his craft as assistant to Rene Clair and Jacques
Feyder before making (1936) his feature debut. During the German occupation of
France, Carne and Prevert produced two theatrical spectacles, Les Visiteurs du
soir (Evening Visitors, 1942) and Children of Paradise (1945). Although Carne
continues to exhibit a fine technical command, his recent films have been less
impressive than his earlier work. ROY ARMES
Pagnol, Marcel
--------------------------------
(pahn-yohl')
A successful French dramatist of the late 1920s, Marcel Pagnol, b. Feb. 28,
1895, d. Apr. 18, 1974, turned to the cinema with the advent of sound and
created for himself a still more remarkable career as a writer-director. At
first, he merely adapted his own plays for others to direct; of the Marseille
trilogy, Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and Cesar (1936), only the third was
directed by Pagnol himself. In 1934, however, he set up his own studios and,
surrounded by a company of actors that included Raimu and Fernandel, he began
to adapt the Provencal stories of Jean Giono into the films that constitute his
major achievements: Joffroi (1934), Angele (1934), Regain (1937), and The
Baker's Wife (1938). His last two films, Manon des sources (1952) and Lettres
de mon moulin (1954), are also the work of a master storyteller. ROY ARMES
Bibliography: Pagnol, Marcel, The Days Were Too Short (1960) and The Time of
Secrets, trans. by Rita Barisse (1962).
Korda, Sir Alexander
--------------------------------
(kohr'-duh)
Alexander Korda, the professional name of Sandor Kellner, b. Sept. 16, 1893,
d. Jan. 23, 1956, was a major figure in British cinema for almost 25 years.
He began his producing and directing career in Hungary but left his native land
in 1919 to embark on an international career in Europe and Hollywood. After
establishing London Film Productions in Britain in 1932, Korda achieved world
recognition with The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). Specializing in
historical films and using international directors, he turned out such
successes as Rembrandt (1936), The Four Feathers (1939), The Third Man (1949),
and Richard III (1956). He was knighted in 1942. ROY ARMES
Bibliography: Kulik, Karol, Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles
(1975).
Hitchcock, Alfred
--------------------------------
(hich'-kahk)
Probably no contemporary film director was better known to the general public
or more admired by his colleagues and critics than Alfred Hitchcock. Born in
London, Aug. 13, 1899, he began his directorial career in the silent era with
The Lodger (1927). Hitchcock's work during the next decade--Blackmail (1929),
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), and The Lady
Vanishes (1938)--established him worldwide as the preeminent director of witty
suspense thrillers. It also established his personal trademark: the seemingly
casual appearance in all his films of his own portly figure. Hitchcock, who
received a knighthood in 1980, died on Apr. 29 of that year.
His first film after moving to Hollywood in 1939 was the immensely successful
romantic thriller Rebecca (1940). Subsequently, Foreign Correspondent (1940)
successfully harked back to his British style. Although Shadow of a Doubt
(1943) won praise for its handling of an American setting and Notorious (1946)
was popular with critics and public alike, many of Hitchcock's admirers were
disappointed by other American works, such as Suspicion (1941), Saboteur
(1942), Lifeboat (1943), Spellbound (1945), and Rope (1948). The witty,
ingenious Strangers on a Train (1951), with its sensational merry-go-round
sequence, and North by Northwest (1959), which treated thriller conventions
humorously, were both praised as a return to form. The popularity of the
intervening films exceeded their critical esteem--Dial M for Murder (1954),
Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1953), and a remake of The Man Who Knew
Too Much (1956). What critics missed in them, while acknowledging their
technical mastery, was the wit and sense of milieu that had distinguished
Hitchcock's British suspense thrillers.
Increasingly, however, after the appearance of Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960),
and The Birds (1963), it was recognized that Hitchcock was going beyond
suspense to plumb greater depths of terror. Some critics have emphasized the
Catholic content of Hitchcock's work, others, the Freudian. Whether or not
such explications stand scrutiny, the critical ascendancy of American-period
Hitchcock now seems secure, and the director's technical wizardry remains
unassailable. Hitchcock also enjoyed success as the host (1955-65) of the
popular television suspense series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and as the
editor of such short-story collections as Stories To Be Read with the Lights On
(1973). WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Durgnat, Raymond, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (1974);
LaValley, Albert, ed., Focus on Hitchcock (1972); Spoto, Donald, The Art of
Alfred Hitchcock (1976); Taylor, John Russell, The Life and Work of Alfred
Hitchcock (1978); Truffaut, Francois, in collaboration with Helen G. Scott,
Hitchcock (1967); Wood, Robin, Hitchcock's Films (1965).
Disney, Walt
--------------------------------
The creator of the cartoon character Mickey Mouse and a film innovator who won
a record 30 Academy Awards, Walter Elias Disney, b. Chicago, Dec. 5, 1901, d.
Dec. 15, 1966, was also among the most successful American entrepreneurs. The
entertainment empire he founded includes two giant amusement parks (Disneyland
and Walt Disney World) as well as his film studios. The licensing of
reproduction rights to Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters for use on
clothing, books, and innumerable other objects makes the Disney fantasies ever
present in American life and that of much of the rest of the world as
well.^Disney's childhood was spent in Marceline, Mo. (whose main street may
have inspired the nostalgia-laden main streets of the amusement parks), and in
Kansas City, Mo., where he met Ub Iwerks, who became a Disney collaborator.
When their Kansas City animation studio failed in 1923, Disney founded a new
studio in Hollywood, and Iwerks became chief artist and special-effects
designer.^By 1928, Disney and Iwerks had perfected the immortal Mickey Mouse,
who made history the same year in Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon with
sound. (Mickey's squeaky voice was supplied by Disney.) In succeeding Disney
cartoons--including the famous series Silly Symphonies--the characters moved to
the rhythm of a pre-recorded soundtrack, making possible a humorous and
ingenious match of motion to sound (see ANIMATION). By the mid-1930s all
Disney cartoons were made in color, and his stable of eccentric animal
characters (Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, and the rest) was almost complete,
produced by a studio that came to employ hundreds of artists.^The world's first
feature-length animated film, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938),
proved a stunning financial success and was followed by a number of other
full-length animations, including Fantasia (1940), which combined classical
music with animated sequences, Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi
(1942). The Reluctant Dragon (1941) was the first of many Disney films to use
a sophisticated matte technique that allowed live and cartoon characters to
appear together.^In the 1950s, Disney turned to films with live characters,
such as Treasure Island (1950), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and the
musical fantasy Mary Poppins (1964); to nature films whose fine photography was
marred for some critics by the sentimentality of approach; and to films
produced for television--the Davy Crockett series, for example. TV's "Mickey
Mouse Club" (1955-59, 1975-77) revived the old cartoon figures for a new
generation of children who would meet them again--more or less live--at
Disneyland and Disney World.
Bibliography: Canemaker, John, Treasures of Disney Animation Art, ed. by W.
Rawls (1982); Finch, Christopher, The Art of Walt Disney (1973); Maltin,
Leonard, The Disney Films (1973); Schickel, Richard, The Disney Version (1968);
Thomas, Bob, Walt Disney (1976).
Riefenstahl, Leni
--------------------------------
(ree'-fen-shtahl)
Adolf Hitler's favorite film director, Leni Riefenstahl, b. Berlin, Aug. 22,
1902, achieved an international reputation on the basis of two extraordinary
documentaries. Her first film, the mystical Blue Light (1932), excited
Hitler's imagination, and following her short documentary of the Nazi party's
1933 Nuremberg rally, Victory of Faith (1934), he commissioned her to give
feature-length treatment to the same event in 1934. The result, Triumph of the
Will (1935), was an impressive spectacle of Germany's adherence to Hitler and
to National Socialist ideals, and a masterpiece of romanticized propaganda.
Equally famous, and far less controversial, was her coverage of the 1936
Olympic Games in Berlin, the four-hour epic Olympia (1938). Blacklisting by
the Allies (1945-52) and postwar ostracism ended Riefenstahl's career as a
filmmaker. She was subsequently acclaimed for The Last of the Nuba (1974), a
superb volume of photographs of Nuba tribal life in southern Sudan. ROGER
MANVELL
Bibliography: Infield, Glenn B., Leni Riefenstahl (1976); Sarris, Andrew,
Interviews with Film Directors (1967).
Stroheim, Erich von
--------------------------------
(shtroh'-hym)
A legendary figure in the Hollywood of the silent era, actor, director, and
scriptwriter Erich von Stroheim, b. Vienna, Sept. 22, 1885, d. May 12, 1957,
is celebrated both for his ruinous extravagances as a filmmaker and his screen
portrayals of stiff-necked German officers. As a director he demonstrated his
brilliance as well as his limitations. His only successfully completed
films--Blind Husbands (1919), the Devil's Passkey (1919), and Foolish Wives
(1921), in two of which he played the lead--bear the stamp of his wit,
sophistication, lavish attention to detail, and sometimes brutal realism.
Thereafter, his career was marked by frustration as his ambitious artistic
schemes for such films as Merry-Go-Round (1922), Greed (1923), and The Wedding
March (1926) repeatedly ran afoul of whistle-blowing producers at Universal,
MGM, and Paramount, who cut and distorted his work beyond recognition. His
most famous failure, Queen Kelly (1928), which was to star Gloria Swanson,
effectively ended his directorial hopes. Concentrating exclusively on acting
after 1936, von Stroheim gave his most distinguished performances in Jean
Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937) and in Billy Wilder's inspired film a clef,
Sunset Boulevard (1950), playing a former director opposite Gloria Swanson's
evocation of an aging, fantasy-ridden silent-film star. ELEANOR M. GATES
Bibliography: Curtiss, Thomas Q., Von Stroheim (1971); Noble, Peter, Hollywood
Scapegoat (1950; repr. 1972).
Chaney, Lon
--------------------------------
(chay'-nee)
Lon Chaney, b. Apr. 1, 1883, d. Aug. 26, 1930, Hollywood's "man of a
thousand faces," was a leading character actor specializing in macabre roles.
His ability to mime, to change physical appearance, and skill with makeup
served him well in such films as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The
Phantom of the Opera (1925). LESLIE HALLIWELL
Bibliography: Andersen, Robert Gordon, Faces, Forms, Films: The Artistry of Lon
Chaney (1971).
Flaherty, Robert Joseph
--------------------------------
(flay'-urt-ee)
Robert Joseph Flaherty, b. Iron Mountain, Mich., Feb. 16, 1884, d. July 23,
1951, was a filmmaker whose originality and poetic vision helped create a
romantic tradition in documentary films. Before making Nanook of the North
(1922), a depiction of Eskimo life and his first and most famous film, Flaherty
explored Canada as a mapmaker. His interest in native cultures and the simple
agrarian life is reflected in later films--Moana (1926), Tabu (1931), Man of
Aran (1934), and Louisiana Story (1948).
Bibliography: Flaherty, Frances H., The Odyssey of a Film-maker: Robert
Flaherty's Story (1960; repr. 1972); Griffith, Richard, The World of Robert
Flaherty (1953; repr. 1972).
EXPRESSION
expressionism
--------------------------------
(literature, theater, and film)
Expressionism, a term applied to avant-garde German painting in 1911, rapidly
gained currency in literature, but does not describe a cohesive literary
movement. In poetry and drama, expressionism represented a reaction to the
sentimentality of late-19th-century romanticism. Expressionist poets, writing
in Germany and Austria between 1910 and 1924, were influenced by Freudian
theories of the subconscious, the antirationalism of Friedrich Nietzsche, and
the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky to probe their own imaginations for subject
matter. The poems of Johannes BECHER, Gottfried BENN, Georg HEYM, Ernst
TOLLER, Georg TRAKL, and Franz WERFEL are characterized by chaotic, frenzied
imagery and a vehement tone that threatens to overwhelm their literary form.
Expressionism reveals latent energies beneath the surface of appearances and
evokes extreme states of mind. Certain qualities of expressionism are also
found in the prose of Franz KAFKA, but the movement was strongest in the
theater. The dramas of August STRINDBERG and Frank WEDEKIND provided a strong
impetus to later writers such as Georg Kaiser, Carl Sternheim, Fritz von Unruh,
Reinhard Sorge, and Walter Hasenclever, whose works are characterized by terse
dialogue, disturbing incident, and intensely subjective emotion presented in a
succession of scenes or "stations." After 1917 expressionist drama dominated
the German theater for about 6 years--during which time production styles also
cultivated expressive exaggerations and distortion--and left its mark on the
silent cinema, especially in the films of Fritz LANG and Robert Wiene.
Expressionism left an important legacy of technique to many later writers. The
aims of the expressionist movement were assimilated by DADA, and can also be
discerned in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1921) and The Hairy Ape
(1922), and in Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923).
Bibliography: Furness, R. S., Expressionism (1973); Krispyn, Egbert, Style and
Society in German Literary Expressionism (1964); Willett, John, Expressionism
(1971).
Bauhaus
--------------------------------
(bow'-hows)
The Bauhaus (full name staatliches Bauhaus, "state building house") was the
most famous school of architecture and design of the 20th century. Founded by
Walter GROPIUS at Weimar, Germany, in 1919, the Bauhaus was originally a
combined school of fine art and school of arts and crafts. In his opening
manifesto, Gropius issued a call for the unification of all the creative arts
under the leadership of architecture. He declared that a mastery of materials
and techniques was essential for all creative design. Students were to have
two teachers in every course, one an expert craftsman, the other a master
artist. The preliminary course, organized by Johannes Itten, introduced
students to rudiments of design, freed from historic associations: size,
shape, line, color, pattern, texture, rhythm, and density. This course has
become the foundation for design education in many countries. It was followed
in the curriculum by advanced work with form and materials, including workshops
in stone, wood, metal, pottery, glass, painting, and textiles. Industrial
design became a major focus at the Bauhaus, which hoped to improve radically
the quality of all manufactured goods.
Teachers appointed in the early years included Lyonel FEININGER, Gerhard
Marcks, Johannes Itten, and Adolf Meyer (1919); Georg Muche (1920); Paul KLEE
and Oskar SCHLEMMER (1921); Wassily KANDINSKY (1922); and Laszlo MOHOLY-NAGY
(1923). From the beginning, the striking newness of the concepts developed at
the Bauhaus and the liberal beliefs of many of the people associated with it
aroused strong opposition.
In 1925 political pressures forced the removal of the school from Weimar to
Dessau, where Gropius designed a new complex of buildings for it, including
classrooms, shops, offices, and dwellings for faculty and students. This group
of buildings in Dessau came to symbolize the Bauhaus to the rest of the world.
Although Gropius repeatedly insisted that it was never his intention to codify
a Bauhaus style or dogma, the need for a new architectural image appropriate to
a technological age caused the Bauhaus to be adopted as a model for what came
to be known as the INTERNATIONAL STYLE, or, more generally, MODERN
ARCHITECTURE.
Gropius left the Bauhaus for private practice in 1928 and was succeeded as
director by Hannes Meyer. Strong political pressures continued. In 1930
Ludwig MIES VAN DER ROHE took over as director, moved the school to Berlin in
1932, and finally closed and disbanded it under pressure from the Nazis in
1933. Among the former students who became important teachers at the Bauhaus
were Joseph ALBERS, Marcel BREUER, and Herbert Bayer. The Bauhaus became
influential around the world as a result of the continued active teaching and
designing by former faculty and students, including many Americans. In the
United States, Gropius became dean of the School of Architecture at Harvard
University, Mies van der Rohe became dean of architecture at Illinois Institute
of Technology, and Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago.
The work and principles of the Bauhaus have been further disseminated by many
publications and exhibitions that have circulated internationally. A major
Bauhaus Archive, founded at Darmstadt in 1961, was moved in the 1970s to
Berlin. Another Bauhaus Archive is kept at Harvard University. The design
philosophy of the Bauhaus continues pervasive to the present day. RON
WIEDENHOEFT
Bibliography: Franciscono, Marcel, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the
Bauhaus in Weimar (1971); Wingler, Hans, The Bauhaus (1969).
Eastman, George
--------------------------------
George Eastman, b. Waterville, N.Y., July 12, 1854, d. Mar. 14, 1932,
founded (1892) the Eastman Kodak Company. While working as a bank clerk, he
became interested in PHOTOGRAPHY. He refined the process for making
photographic plates, which he soon began to manufacture, and in 1884 he
introduced flexible FILM. He produced his Kodak box CAMERA in 1888, marketing
it on a mass basis for amateur photographers. Large investments in research
led to further innovations in cameras and equipment, including daylight-loading
film and pocket cameras. Eastman gave enormous sums to educational
institutions, and in his company introduced the first employee profit-sharing
system in the United States.
Bibliography: Coe, Brian, George Eastman (1976).
Lang, Fritz
--------------------------------
A long and distinguished career in Germany made Fritz Lang, b. Vienna, Dec.
5, 1890, d. Aug. 2, 1976, probably the most famous of the many European film
directors who fled Hitler for Hollywood during the 1930s. Lang's early studies
of painting and architecture clearly influenced the expressionist style and
grand scale of such films as Destiny (1921), the two-part Nibelung Saga (1924),
and his celebrated depiction of a futuristic slave society, Metropolis (1927).
During the same period Lang was also making smaller-scaled studies of criminal
society in Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and The Spy (1928), which, with The
Last Will of Dr. Mabuse (1932), strongly suggested his anti-Nazi sentiments.
Lang's interest in the criminal mind produced his masterpiece--the chilling
portrait of a child killer, M (1931), Lang's first sound film, starring Peter
Lorre. Lang left Germany for France in 1933.
Lang made a highly successful American debut with Fury (1936), an indictment of
mob violence, followed by a plea for social justice in You Only Live Once
(1937). These films gave way to a succession of melodramas, most notably The
Ministry of Fear (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Scarlet Street
(1945), that painted a picture of society less in terms of social issues than
of a nameless, oppressive sense of dread. These expressionist nightmares,
along with M, constitute the height of Lang's achievement. Thereafter,
although he directed an offbeat Western in Rancho Notorious (1952), a
first-rate police thriller in The Big Heat (1953), and a stylish costume drama
in Moonfleet (1955), his films were of diminishing interest. A distinctive
stylist despite the multiplicity of genres in which he worked, Lang was much
admired by the French New Wave directors of the 1960s. WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Bogdanovich, Peter, Fritz Lang in America (1968); Eisner, Lotte,
Fritz Lang (1977); Jensen, Paul M., The Cinema of Fritz Lang (1969).
Murnau, F. W.
--------------------------------
(moor'-now)
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, originally surnamed Plumpe, b. Dec. 28, 1888,
directed films during the German cinema's most experimental period and was
perhaps the greatest of all filmmakers of the 1920s. Fewer than half of his 22
films have been preserved, but what remains is proof that he excelled in every
genre he tried: the horror film, as in Nosferatu (1922); realistic lowlife
drama, as in The Last Laugh (1924); and classical adaptation, as in Faust
(1926). His command of lighting and composition, together with his fluent
moving camera style, are also apparent in his Hollywood films--especially his
masterpiece, Sunrise (1927), which transmutes melodrama into the purest
cinematic poetry. Murnau was killed in a car crash near Monterey on Mar. 11,
1931, a week before the opening of his romantic South Seas narrative, Tabu.
ROY ARMES
Bibliography: Eisner, Lotte H., Murnau (1973).
Pabst, G. W.
--------------------------------
(pahpst)
A major contributor to the German cinema during its experimental silent and
early sound eras, director George William Pabst, b. Bohemia, Aug. 27, 1885,
d. May 30, 1967, is especially identified with the straightforward portrayal
of human degradation, as in two of his greatest films, Joyless Street (1925)
and Pandora's Box (1929). In these he combined realism and social commentary,
although he was equally adept at working in naturalistic and expressionist
genres. Equally well known are Pabst's first sound films, the pacifist
Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft (1931)--whose appeal to
internationalist sentiment displeased the Nazis--and his version of Brecht and
Weill's Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera, 1931). His Don Quixote (1933),
made in France, starred the renowned Russian singer Chaliapin in his only film
role. Following World War II, Pabst made The Trial (1947) and Ten Days to Die
(1955), an account of Hitler's end.
Kracauer, Siegfried
--------------------------------
(krah'-kow-ur, zeek'-freet)
Siegfried Kracauer, b. Feb. 8, 1889, d. Nov. 26, 1966, was an influential
German-Jewish film historian and theoretician best known for his championship
of realism as the truest function of cinema. Cultural affairs editor (1920-33)
of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer left Germany after the rise of Adolf
Hitler, and during World War II he conducted research into Nazi propaganda
films for New York's Museum of Modern Art. His From Caligari to Hitler (1947)
was an exploration of the roots of Nazism in the German cinema of the 1920s.
Kracauer's most important work, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical
Reality (1960), argues--with more intensity than consistency--for a cinema
devoted to the presentation of real-life people in real-life situations in a
style from which all theatrical or aesthetically formal elements would be
excluded. ROGER MANVELL
Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich
--------------------------------
(ize'-en-shtine, sir-gay' mee-ky'-loh-vich)
Sergei Eisenstein, b. Jan. 23 (N.S.), 1898, d. Feb. 11, 1948, was a seminal
figure in the history of FILM, known for his stylistic innovations and theory
of MONTAGE. His theoretical and practical work are still intensely studied.
Of a well-to-do family from Riga, now in the USSR, Eisenstein studied
engineering and architecture in Petrograd, where he witnessed both the February
and October revolutions of 1917. His service in the Red Army during Russia's
Civil War led him to design (1920) for a front-line mobile theater troupe.
Following the war, Eisenstein worked in Moscow's experimental theaters and
studied under Vsevolod Meyerhold. As a designer and director for the
Proletcult Theatre, Eisenstein and the experimental group he gathered around
him staged Aleksandr Ostrovsky's Even a Wise Man Stumbles (1923) as a circus,
incorporating into the production a short film interlude. This foreshadowed
Eisenstein's subsequent theater work, all of which contained significant
cinematic elements. Placed in charge of Proletcult's first large film project,
Towards the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, envisioned as a series of seven
historical films, Eisenstein began work on Strike (1925); combining exaggerated
theatrical elements with some of the most realistic footage ever filmed by
Eisenstein, this was recognized for its artistic and political power.
Eisenstein's next film, a treatment of the June 1905 naval mutiny on the
battleship Potemkin, received international acclaim after it was shown in
Berlin. The Battleship Potemkin (1925) demonstrated abroad that the USSR could
produce an original film masterpiece and also demonstrated Eisenstein's use of
montage, a revolutionary film editing technique. October (1928), also known as
Ten Days That Shook the World, was similarly innovative, introducing sequences
that tested Eisenstein's theory of an "intellectual cinema," which aimed at
nothing less than the communication of abstract thought by visual means. A
propaganda film (The General Line) on behalf of the collectivization of Soviet
agriculture was released in 1929 under the title Old and New. Between 1929 and
1932 Eisenstein studied foreign sound-film systems in western Europe; signed a
contract with Paramount Pictures (later canceled); and, with the financial
backing of Upton Sinclair, began filming an epic of Mexican culture to be
called Que Viva Mexico!, all footage of which was seized by the Sinclairs after
production was halted (1932).
Trouble also plagued Eisenstein's projects in the USSR, where, in the 1930s,
Stalin's socialist realism supplanted earlier Soviet experimentalism. The
historical drama Alexander Nevsky (1938) temporarily restored Eisenstein to
favor, besides showing what he could do in sound film (in collaboration with
composer Sergei Prokofiev). His last film, made in Kazakhstan during World War
II, was Ivan the Terrible (1944-46), of which only Part I was seen in uncensored
form. Eisenstein's thoughts on film theory and practice can be found in
translations of his The Film Sense (1942), Film Form (1949), Notes of a Film
Director (1959), and Film Essays (1968). JAY LEYDA
Bibliography: Barna, Yon, Eisenstein (1974); Moussinac, Leon, Sergei Eisenstein
(1970); Montagu, Ivor, With Eisenstein in Hollywood (1968); Nizhniy, Vladimir,
Lessons with Eisenstein (1962); Seton, Marie, Sergei M. Eisenstein (1952).
surrealism
--------------------------------
(film, literature, theater)
Surrealism, meaning above realism, is an antiaesthetic movement that grew out
of the nihilistic DADA movement of the years during and immediately after World
War I. Its range being that of human thought itself, surrealism is limited in
scope and application only by the human capacity for self-expression, which
surrealists aim to expand. Writing, painting, film, sculpture, or any other
art form assumes significance for the surrealist when it expresses a surrealist
state of mind.
Surrealism began as a revolt against the control exercised by rationality over
accepted modes of communication. The first surrealists attacked inherited
preconceptions about the nature and function of word poems. In 1919, Andre
BRETON and Philippe Soupault produced the first specifically surrealist text,
Les Champs magnetiques (Magnetic Fields, 1921), by so-called automatic writing,
in which the surrealist banishes deliberate intent, leaving the pen free to
express on paper the uncensored images that well up from the subconscious.
Seeking to embrace all forms of creative expression in their liberative effort
to attain what Breton in his 1924 Manifeste du surrealisme (Manifesto of
Surrealism) called "the true functioning of thought," the surrealists set about
attacking, on the broadest possible front, conventions, prescribed rules, and
consecrated values--cultural as well as aesthetic. This explains, for
instance, their enthusiasm for the films of Luis BUNUEL, whose L'Age d'or (The
Golden Age, 1930) surpassed in violent iconoclasm even his first movie, Un
Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1928).
In its negative attitude toward literary and artistic tradition, and in its
opposition to the heritage of Western culture, surrealism superficially
resembled Dada, the movement with which some of its earliest members, including
Louis ARAGON, Roger VITRAC, Breton, Soupault, and its greatest poet, Benjamin
Peret, all had been affiliated. However, surrealism marked a stage beyond the
nihilism that had inevitably brought Dada to self-destruction. Surrealism was
truly international, and exponents of its revolutionary principles shared an
unshakable faith in the power of the imagination to revitalize poetry and art,
and to compensate for the sociopolitical and religious forces that they found
so oppressive and stultifying in contemporary society. J. H. MATTHEWS
Bibliography: Alquie, Ferdinand, The Philosophy of Surrealism (1965); Breton,
Andre, What Is Surrealism? (1978); Gascoyne, David, A Short Survey of
Surrealism (1935); Matthews, J. H., An Introduction to Surrealism (1965);
Nadeau, Maurice, The History of Surrealism (1965); Read, Herbert, ed.,
Surrealism (1936; repr. 1971).
Kazan, Elia
--------------------------------
{kuh-zan', eel'-yuh}^An American stage and film director, Elia Kazan
(originally Kazanjoglous), b. Istanbul, Turkey, Sept. 7, 1909, to Greek
parents, became a director after a brief career as an actor with New York's
Group Theater in the 1930s. His greatest success was directing plays by Arthur
Miller and Tennessee Williams, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947, film,
1951) and Death of a Salesman (1949). He directed the Academy Award-winning
films Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and On The Waterfront (1954), as well as
East of Eden (1955), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Splendor in the Grass (1961),
and The Last Tycoon (1976). His two autobiographical novels, America, America
(1962) and The Arrangement (1967), were turned into films in 1963 and 1968.
Bibliography: Koszarski, Richard, Hollywood Directors, 1941-1976 (1977).
Jolson, Al
--------------------------------
(johl'-suhn)
The singer Al Jolson, b. Asa Yoelson in Lithuania, c.1886, d. Oct. 23, 1950,
immigrated with his family to Washington, D.C., around 1895. After a long
apprenticeship as a singer in burlesque, minstrel shows, and vaudeville, he won
(1911) his first important role in the Broadway show La Belle Paree. Jolson's
style was notable for its vigor and volume, its blatant sentimentality, and for
his use of blackface, a leftover theatrical convention from the already
moribund minstrel show. His work--especially his film roles, beginning with
The Jazz Singer (1927), the first major sound picture--won him a large audience
during his lifetime. Jolson was awarded the Congressional Medal of Merit
posthumously for his many overseas tours of wartime army camps, the last at the
beginning of the Korean War in 1950.
Bibliography: Friedland, Michael, Jolson (1972). Discography:Best of Al
Jolson: Steppin' Out and California, Here I Come (1911-29).
Duchamp, Marcel
--------------------------------
(doo-shahm')
Marcel Duchamp, b. July 28, 1887, d. Oct. 2, 1968, was a French painter and
theorist, a major proponent of DADA, and one of the most influential figures of
avant-garde 20th-century art. After a brief early period in which he was
influenced chiefly by Paul CEZANNE and Fauve color (see FAUVISM), Duchamp
developed a type of symbolic painting, a dynamic version of facet CUBISM
(similar to FUTURISM), in which the image depicted successive movements of a
single body. It closely resembled the multiple exposure photography documented
in Eadward MUYBRIDGE's book The Horse in Motion (1878).
In 1912, Duchamp painted his famous Nude Descending A Staircase, which caused a
scandal at the 1913 ARMORY SHOW in New York City. In the same year he
developed, with Francis PICABIA and Guillaume APOLLINAIRE, the radical and
ironic ideas that independently prefigured the official founding of Dada in
1916 in Zurich. In Paris in 1914, Duchamp bought and inscribed a bottle rack,
thereby producing his first ready-made, a new art form based on the principle
that art does not depend on established rules or on craftsmanship. Duchamp's
ready-mades are ordinary objects that are signed and titled, becoming
aesthetic, rather than functional, objects simply by this change in context.
Dada aimed at departure from the physical aspect of painting and emphases in
ideas as the chief means of artistic expression.
In 1915, Duchamp moved to New York City, where he was befriended by Louise and
Walter Arensberg and their circle of artists and poets, which constituted New
York Dada. That same year he began his major work, The Large Glass, or The
Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a construction of wire
and painted foil fitted between plates of transparent glass. In 1918 he
completed his last major painting, Tu m', a huge oil and graphite on canvas, a
unique combination of real and painted objects and illusionistic and flat
space. Following his maxim never to repeat himself, Duchamp "stopped" painting
(1923) after 20 works and devoted himself largely to the game of chess.
Nevertheless, by 1944 he had secretly begun sketches on a new project, and
between 1946 and 1949 created his last work, the Etant Donnes (Philadelphia
Museum of Art). BARBARA CAVALIERE
Bibliography: Alexandrian, Sarane, Duchamp (1977); d'Harnoncourt, Anne, and
McShine, Kynaston, eds., Marcel Duchamp (1973); Duchamp, Marcel, From the Green
Box, trans. by George H. Hamilton (1957); Golding, John, Duchamp (1973);
Schwarz, Arturo, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 2d ed. (1970); Tomkins,
Calvin, The World of Marcel Duchamp (1966).
Renoir, Jean
--------------------------------
(ren-wahr')
One of the greatest and best-loved of all French filmmakers, Jean Renoir, b.
Sept. 15, 1894, d. Feb. 13, 1979, the second son of the impressionist
painter Auguste Renoir, exercised a major influence on French cinema for almost
50 years. From his beginnings in the silent era, aspects of his mature film
style were apparent: a love of nature, rejection of class values, and a
mixture of joy and sorrow. Some of his earliest films were made with his wife
Catherine Hessling as star, among them an interpretation of Zola's Nana (1926),
and The Little Match Girl (1928).
During the 1930s Renoir was at the top of his form in two celebrations of
anarchy, La Chienne (The Bitch, 1931) and Boudu sauve des eaux (Boudu Saved
from Drowning, 1932). A new social concern appeared in Toni (1935), Le Crime
de Monsieur Lange (1936), and especially La Vie est a nous (People of France,
1936), made for the French Communist party during the heyday of the Popular
Front. Renoir's reputation, however, rests mainly on A Day in the Country
(1936, completed 1946), based on a bittersweet de Maupassant story; a free
adaptation of Gorki's The Lower Depths (1936); and the widely acclaimed Grand
Illusion (1937). Two very different masterpieces written and directed by
Renoir, the tightly structured The Human Beast (1938) and the largely
improvised Rules of the Game (1939)--which perfectly captured the mood of
France before its collapse in 1940--crowned this prolific period.
Renoir spent the war years in Hollywood, but even the best of his films made in
the United States, such as The Southerner (1945) and The Diary of a Chambermaid
(1946), lack the excitement of his prewar work. He found a new approach and a
new philosophy in India, where he made his first color film, The River (1950),
before returning to Europe to make the colorful and relaxed films of his
maturity: The Golden Coach (1952), French Can Can (1954), and Paris Does
Strange Things (1956). Always an innovator, Renoir used television techniques
in the 1959 filming of Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier and Picnic on the
Grass, the latter strongly evocative of the sun-filled landscapes beloved by
his father. For his last film, The Elusive Corporal (1962), set in World War
II, he returned to themes earlier explored in Grand Illusion and The Lower
Depths. Renoir's considerable influence on the French New Wave directors of
the late 1950s can be seen especially in the films of Francois Truffaut. ROY
ARMES
Bibliography: Bazin, Andre, Jean Renoir, ed. by Francois Truffaut (1973);
Braudy, Leo, Jean Renoir--The World of His Films (1972); Durgnat, Raymond, Jean
Renoir (1974); Gilliatt, Penelope, Jean Renoir: Essays, Conversations, and
Reviews (1975); Renoir, Jean, My Life and My Films (1974).
Melies, Georges
--------------------------------
{may-lee-es'}^A major contributor to the development of world cinema in its
formative years, the Frenchman Georges Melies, b. Paris, Dec. 6, 1861, d.
Jan. 21, 1938, began his career as a conjurer. He was attracted to the cinema
immediately after seeing the first Lumiere showings in 1895 and soon developed
his own distinctive studio-based style. Melies was fascinated by the spectacle
and trickery possible in the cinema, and his hundreds of little films, mostly
dealing with fantastic subjects, are full of dancing girls and acrobatic
devils, awe-inspiring disasters and miraculous transformations. For 10 years
after 1896, Melies's Star Film company was a dominant force in the film
industry, producing such inventive and amusing short subjects as A Trip to the
Moon (1902) and New York-Paris by Automobile (1908). His production methods
and conception of film action as a sequence of tableaux, however, gradually
became outdated. He ceased production in 1912 and was reduced to poverty. ROY
ARMES
Bibliography: Hammond, Paul, Marvellous Melies (1974).
neorealism
--------------------------------
Neorealism as an Italian literary movement can be said to have begun in 1929
with Alberto MORAVIA's Time of Indifference (Eng. trans., 1932), a novel that
unflinchingly addressed highly sensitive moral, social, and political issues
during the early repressive years of Mussolini's dictatorship. The movement
developed slowly, however, until the overthrow of the fascist regime in 1943.
Neorealist novels of the next 12 years by such disparate writers as Vasco
PRATOLINI, Domenico Rea, and Italo CALVINO focused on the plight of
working-class people and thus represented a break with the elitist tradition
that had characterized Italian literature for centuries. Neorealism, both as a
style and as a political outlook, became even better known internationally
through the 1940s and postwar films of Italian directors Luchino VISCONTI
(Ossessione, 1942; La Terra Trema, 1948), Roberto ROSSELLINI (Open City, 1945;
Paisan, 1947), and Vittorio DE SICA (Shoeshine, 1946; The Bicycle Thief, 1948;
Umberto D., 1952). SERGIO PACIFICI
De Sica, Vittorio
--------------------------------
(day see'-kah)
The Italian film director and actor Vittorio De Sica, b. July 7, 1901, d.
Nov. 13, 1974, achieved international recognition after World War II for his
important contributions to Italian neorealistic cinema as well as for his
numerous, mostly comic, starring roles. Trained in the 1920s for the stage, De
Sica won success as a film actor in the 1930s and directed his first film, Rose
Scarlette, in 1940. The Children Are Watching Us (1942) marked the beginning
of his long collaboration with the screenwriter and theorist of neorealism
Cesare Zavattini. Fame came with Shoeshine (1946), a harsh social commentary
on war-ravaged Italy that exemplified the neorealist style. This was followed
by Bicycle Thieves (1948), the story of an unemployed man's search for work;
the fantasy Miracle in Milan (1951); and Umberto D (1952), a haunting portrayal
of a poor and hopeless old man.
During the 1950s, De Sica appeared in more than 50 films, playing his most
memorable role as the scoundrel-turned-hero of General della Rovere (1959). In
the 1960s he concentrated on commercial successes, two of which--Two Women
(1960) and Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963)--won Academy Awards. With The
Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), about the plight of Jews in Fascist Italy,
De Sica returned to the social commentary, but not the style, of his earlier
films. His last picture was A Brief Vacation (1973). GAUTAM DASGUPTA
Losey, Joseph
--------------------------------
{loh'-zee}^Although forced to abandon his career in the United States when
blacklisted in the 1950s, Joseph Losey, b. La Crosse, Wis., Jan. 14, 1909, d.
June 22, 1984, went on to become an important director in the British film
industry. After extensive stage experience, Losey made his first feature film,
The Boy with Green Hair, in 1948. This was followed by several taut
melodramas--The Lawless (1950), The Prowler (1951), M (1951; a remake of Fritz
Lang's classic), and The Big Night (1951)--that some still consider his best
work. In 1952, during a period in which he was forced to work pseudonymously,
he moved to London. There Losey gained international recognition with The
Servant (1963), a film that marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration
with playwright Harold PINTER, later resumed in Accident (1967) and The
Go-Between (1971). The charged atmospherics of these films also characterized
such subsequent Losey efforts without Pinter as The Romantic Englishwoman
(1975) and Mr. Klein (1977). WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Hirsch, Joseph, Joseph Losey (1980); Leahy, James, The Cinema of
Joseph Losey (1967); Losey, Joseph, Losey on Losey, ed. by Tom Milne (1968).
Visconti, Luchino
--------------------------------
An aristocrat by birth and a Marxist by inclination, Italian filmmaker Luchino
Visconti, b. Nov. 2, 1906, d. Mar. 17, 1976, is known both for his
contributions to NEOREALISM and his frank aestheticism. After working with
Renoir, he directed his first film, Ossessione (1942), an antecedent, and
arguably one of the masterpieces, of neorealist cinema. In the film
self-destructive sexual passions are played out against a landscape of
extraordinary beauty. Visconti used documentary techniques in his next film,
La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), to describe the lives of peasants in
a Sicilian fishing village. One of his favorite themes was the tension between
family solidarity and the destructive power of family relationships, best
expressed in Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and The Damned (1969). Visconti's
first film in color, Senso (1953), brilliantly portraying political and sexual
conflicts during the Austro-Italian war of 1866, displayed the lavish attention
to detail and love for period reconstructions that would become his hallmarks
in such literary adaptations as The Leopard (1963), The Stranger (1967), Death
in Venice (1971), and The Innocent (1978). GAUTAM DASGUPTA
Bibliography: Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, Luchino Visconti (1973); Stirling,
Monica, Screen of Time: A Study of Luchino Visconti (1979).
Fellini, Federico
--------------------------------
{fel-lee'-nee, fay-day-ree'-koh}^Federico Fellini, Italy's most famous
filmmaker, b. Jan. 20, 1920, has worked with equal enthusiasm and
undiminished energy as an exponent of neorealism, as the creator of symbolic
fantasies, and as a popularizer of the flamboyant and grotesque. His personal
signature is nowhere more evident than in the cinematic classics La Strada and
La Dolce Vita.^After starting in Rome as a cartoonist and sketch writer,
Fellini turned in 1939 to script writing, collaborating with Roberto Rossellini
on such neorealist films as Open City (1945) and The Miracle (1948)--in which
he also acted--before emerging as a director on his own. The White Skeikh
(1952), his first solo effort, showed his inventiveness as a comic director,
and I Vitelloni (1953), an evocation of the Rimini of his youth, demonstrated
his insight into the provincial bourgeoisie. La Strada (1954), starring his
wife Giulietta Masina, secured his position as a major director and won a 1956
Academy Award as the best foreign film. With its comedy and pathos, stunning
visual effects, and haunting musical score, it prodded the viewer into an
awareness of the quixotic nature of life that remains for Fellini a central
truth. This mood was continued in Nights of Cabiria (1956).^In later films
Fellini began to explore more fully the relationship between reality and dream.
La Dolce Vita (1960), a sensational indictment of the indolence and decadence
of modern Rome, was followed by the more openly symbolic 81/2 (1963), in which
Fellini used Pirandellian techniques to comment on his creative problems as an
artist, and Juliet of the Spirits (1965). Critics were less happy with the
exaggerations and thematic repetitiveness of Satyricon (1969), Roma (1972), and
Casanova (1976). All Fellini's strengths--and few of his excesses--coalesced
in Amarcord (1974), a brilliantly nostalgic portrait of his boyhood in Rimini
during the early years of the fascist era. This and his television film, The
Clowns (1970), reveal the essentially autobiographical wellsprings of Fellini's
art. City of Women (1981) returned to his dream theme. His later films
include And the Ship Sails On (1984) and Ginger and Fred (1986), which reunited
Fellini and Masina on the screen.
Bibliography: Bonadella, Peter, ed., Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism
(1978); Fellini, Federico, Fellini on Fellini, trans. by Isabel Quigley (1976);
Murray, Edward, Fellini the Artist (1976); Rosenthal, Stuart, The Cinema of
Federico Fellini (1976).
Antonioni, Michelangelo
--------------------------------
{ahn-toh-nee-oh'-nee, mee-kel-ahn'-jel-oh}^Michelangelo Antonioni, b. Sept.
29, 1912, is an Italian director best known for a trilogy of films begun in
1959 that created a sense of despair through the juxtaposition of haunting
visual imagery, elliptical, mysterious plots, and the portrayal of neurotic,
empty lives. He began his career in the cinema as a film critic and
scriptwriter and, after working with Roberto Rossellini and Marcel Carne, made
his debut as a director in 1943 with the documentary Gente del Po (The People
of the Po Valley). Cronaca di un Amore (Chronicle of a Love, 1950), his first
feature, represented a break with the neorealist tradition. Two later films,
Le Amiche (The Friends, 1955) and Il Grido (The Cry, 1957), were slow-paced and
deliberately obscure in narrative structure. Antonioni's distinctive style
reached its highest expression in the trilogy L'Avventura (The Adventure,
1959), La Notte (Night, 1960), and L'Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962). In these
films, and in the machine-dominated Deserto Rosso (Red Desert, 1964), his first
color film, mystery and eroticism merge in landscapes of compelling beauty.
Antonioni's subsequent English-language films, Blow-Up (1966), Zabriskie Point
(1970), and The Passenger (1975), and Identification Of A Woman (1982) had less
success with the critics despite their stylistic interest.
Bibliography: Cameron, Ian, and Wood, Robin, Antonioni (1969); Sarris, Andrew,
ed., Interviews with Film Directors (1968).
Wertmuller, Lina
--------------------------------
{wairt'-muhl-ur}^A highly original and controversial Italian filmmaker, Lina
Wertmuller, b. c.1926, specializes in melodramatic tragicomedies characterized
by an idiosyncratic blend of wit, irony, socialist dialectics, and sheer
grotesquerie. She has taken on such themes as economic exploitation and the
inability of the striving worker to rise above it in The Seduction of Mimi
(1972), an anarchist's abortive attempt to assassinate Mussolini in Love and
Anarchy (1973), the subordination of natural love to class interests in Swept
Away (1975), and the insanities to which chauvinism--male or national--can lead
in Seven Beauties (1976). In 1977 she directed her first English language
film, The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in A Night Full of Rain. Her other
films include Blood Feud (1978), A Joke of Destiny (1983), and Sotto Sotto
(1985). She directed an off-Broadway play entitled Love and Magic in Mama's
Kitchen (1983) and wrote the novel The Head of Alvise (1982). Wertmuller has
demonstrated rare ingenuity in mixing the tragic with the farcical but is more
successful in communicating her love for human nature than any political
message. ELEANOR M. GATES
Bibliography: Ferlita, Ernest, and May, John R., Parables of Lina Wertmuller
(1977).
Guinness, Sir Alec
--------------------------------
(gin'-es) Alec Guinness, b. Apr. 2, 1914, is an English stage and screen
actor known particularly for his character roles and comic impersonations. He
was a respected member of the Old Vic when roles in film adaptations of two
Dickens novels--Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations (1946) and Fagin in Oliver
Twist (1948)--brought him a larger public. He became better known through
bravura performances in such British film comedies as Kind Hearts and Coronets
(1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The
Ladykillers (1955).
Guinness received an Oscar for his performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957) and was knighted in 1959. Guinness subsequently gave distinguished
dramatic performances in Tunes of Glory (1960), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and
Star Wars (1977).
Since 1980, Guinness has made several television appearances that further
attest to his versatility as a character actor, including his highly acclaimed
performances as George Smiley in the television miniseries "Tinker, Tailor,
Soldier, Spy" (1980) and its sequel, "Smiley's People" (1981)--both based on
John LECARRE novels.
Bibliography: Tynan, Kenneth, Alec Guinness: An Illustrated Study of His Work
for Stage and Screen, 3d ed. (1961).
Kurosawa, Akira
--------------------------------
{koo-roh'-sah-wah, ah-kee'-rah}^The best-known Japanese film director, Akira
Kurosawa, b. Mar. 23, 1910, first achieved international recognition with
Rashomon (1950)--a brilliant study of a crime of violence told from four
different points of view--which won the 1951 Venice grand prize. His
reputation within Japan, however, was based on a series of chambara
(sword-fight) epics set in feudal times, such as Sugata Sanshiro (1943), The
Seven Samurai (1954), and Yojimbo (1961). Kurosawa has also dealt sensitively
with contemporary themes in Ikiru (1952), about a lonely old man dying of
cancer; High and Low (1963), a taut crime drama set in modern Yokohama; and Red
Beard (1965), an indictment of social injustice. Known for his use of multiple
cameras, extended takes, and tight editing, Kurosawa has made screen
adaptations of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot (1951), Gorky's The Lower Depths (1957),
and Shakespeare's Macbeth (Throne of Blood, 1957). Dersu Uzala (1976), which
won an Academy Award, was made in the USSR. With Kagemusha (1980), he returned
to Japan and to the medieval drama he has exploited so successfully in the
past. His samurai adaptation of King Lear, Ran (1985), was both a critical and
popular success. Kurosawa's reminiscenses (Something Like an Autobiography,
trans. by Audie E. Bock) were published in 1982.
Bibliography: Mellen, Joan, Voices from the Japanese Cinema (1975); Richie,
Donald, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965). Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese
Cinema (1982).
Pinter, Harold
--------------------------------
{pin'-tur}^Harold Pinter, b. Oct. 10, 1930, one of England's leading
contemporary playwrights, studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
and began his theatrical career as an actor. He wrote his first play, The
Room, in 1957, but first established himself as a highly original talent in
1960 with The Caretaker, a characteristic Pinteresque drama in its evocation of
terror amid farcical "business" and sometimes fanciful dialogue. Typically,
Pinter's solipsistic characters seek security, self-identification, and
verification of truth but find communication virtually impossible. Instead,
there are pathetic games, cliches, long silences, and sinister threats, all
presented in suspenseful yet comic plots. Akin to the theater of the absurd,
Pinter's plays have more accurately been called "comedies of menace."^In
Pinter's first full-length play, The Birthday Party (1958), for instance, two
gangsters interrogate and terrorize a nervous young pianist. The Caretaker
(1960) centers on an old derelict who intrudes on two mysterious brothers and
is ultimately thrown out by them. Pinter's reputation as an allusive and
controversial dramatist grew significantly with The Homecoming (1965), in which
a married couple visits the lower-class father and brothers of the husband, now
a philosophy professor in the United States, and the wife finally remains in
England to serve the family as a prostitute. Two later plays, Old Times (1971)
and No Man's Land (1975), deal, respectively, with a middle-aged couple, their
mysterious visitor (who once knew the wife), and the power of memory to wound;
and the curious relationship between two elderly men of letters, one a success,
the other a failure.^A less typical, lyrical Pinter double bill consists of the
solitary reminiscences of a sentimental wife and her bluff but unimaginative
mate (Landscape, 1968) and of a woman and two men with whom she once kept
company (Silence, 1969). More characteristic of Pinter are the one-act plays
The Dumb Waiter (1960), The Lover (1963), Tea Party (1965), and The Basement
(1967).^Pinter has written screenplays for his own The Caretaker (1962) and The
Birthday Party (1969) as well as for three films directed by Joseph Losey: The
Servant (1963), Accident (1967), and The Go-Between (1971). The controversial
screenplay for the movie The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981; John Fowles's
novel) was also by Pinter. He also adapted Russell Hoban's novel Turtle Diary
(1985) for the screen. Since 1967 Pinter has also directed such plays as Simon
Gray's Butley (1971; film, 1973) and Otherwise Engaged (1975). His most recent
plays are Betrayal (1979; film, 1983, from Pinter's screenplay), and Family
Voices (1981). In 1985 he directed Lauren Bacall in a London production of
Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. MYRON MATLAW
Bibliography: Dukore, Bernard F., Where Laughter Stops: Pinter's Tragicomedy
(1976); Esslin, Martin, The Peopled Wound: The Work of Harold Pinter (1970);
Gale, Steven H., Butter's Going Up: A Critical Analysis of Harold Pinter's Work
(1977); Hayman, Ronald, Harold Pinter (1973); Hinchliffe, Arnold, Harold Pinter
(1975).
Mizoguchi, Kenji
--------------------------------
(mee'-zoh-goo-chee, ken'-jee)
The Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi, b. May 16, 1898, d. Aug. 24,
1956, is best known for his jidai-geki, or "period dramas," with their
portrayal of the horrors of war, the lives of courtesans, and male-female
relationships. His films (about 80) are wrought with a beauty and clarity
unparalleled in Japanese cinema. Early productions dealt with the sufferings
of women; his later efforts, such as Saikaku Ichidai Onna (The Life of Oharu,
1952), Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), and Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954), reflect his
meditative style, which is characterized by long takes, a virtually immobile
camera, few close-ups, and slow dissolves. GAUTAM DASGUPTA
Bibliography: Anderson, Joseph L., and Richie, Donald, The Jap anese Film
(1959).
Ray, Satyajit
--------------------------------
{ry, suht'-yuh-jit}^Satyajit Ray, b. May 2, 1922, is India's foremost film
director. A versatile craftsman who has worked in several film genres, Ray is
known best outside India for his moving depictions of Indian family life. His
acknowledged masterpiece, the neorealist trilogy made up of Pather Panchali
(1955), Aparajito (1956), and The World of Apu (1959), lyrically chronicles the
day-to-day activities of a rural Bengali family and the coming of age of the
boy Apu. Two other outstanding Ray films, Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958) and
Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963), deal with the changing nature of contemporary
Indian life, whereas Charulata (1964) is a graceful adaptation of Rabindranath
Tagore's classic portrait of the Indian middle classes in the Victorian era.
In later films such as Aranyer din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, 1970),
Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), and Seemabadha (Company Ltd., 1971), Ray has
focused on political and social themes without losing his humanistic
perspective. He composed the music for many of his films, including the Ghare
baire (Home of the World, 1984), based on Tagore's novel about the Bengal in
the early 20th century. GAUTAM DASGUPTA
Bibliography: Seton, Marie, Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray (1971).
Bergman, Ingrid
--------------------------------
Ingrid Bergman, b. Aug. 29, 1915, d. Aug. 29, 1982, was a popular stage and
film actress in her native Sweden before going to Hollywood, where she made an
English-language version of her Swedish hit Intermezzo (1939). Bergman was
probably best known for her roles in Casablanca (1942); For Whom the Bell Tolls
(1943); Gaslight (1944), for which she received her first Academy Award; The
Bells of St. Mary's (1945); and two Alfred HITCHCOCK films, Spellbound (1945)
and Notorious (1946). She returned to Europe after the scandalous publicity
surrounding her affair with Italian director Roberto ROSSELLINI (whom she later
married and divorced) during the filming of Stromboli (1950). But she returned
to Hollywood and triumphed in Anastasia (1956), for which she received another
Oscar. She received a third for her role in Murder on the Orient Express
(1974). She also starred in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978). Her last
role was in the television film A Woman Called Golda (1981).
Bibliography: Bergman, Ingrid, and Burgess, Allan, Ingrid Bergman: My Story
(1980); Quirk, Lawrence J., The Films of Ingrid Bergman (1970; repr. 1975).
Bergman, Ingmar
--------------------------------
Ingmar Ernst Bergman, b. July 14, 1918, is a major Swedish filmmaker who for
over 20 years has sustained a reputation as an artist of international stature.
The son of a Lutheran pastor, Bergman attended Stockholm University and began
his directing career in the theater, where he continues to work as extensively
as he does in films. He wrote the screenplay for the director Alf Sjoberg's
internationally acclaimed Torment in 1944, and the next year he directed his
first film, Crisis.^Although Bergman's Illicit Interlude (1950) was moderately
successful and the lighthearted Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) even more so,
it was only after The Seventh Seal (1957), which made an extraordinarily
powerful impression with its despairing philosophy and stark medieval imagery,
that a widespread interest developed in such earlier Bergman films as The Naked
Night (1953) and A Lesson in Love (1956). With The Seventh Seal, Bergman
definitively established the theme that was to characterize virtually all his
subsequent work--the individual's quasi-religious search for faith in a context
of anguished doubt. This is central to such varied films as Wild Strawberries
(1957), The Magician (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960), and his "chamber"
trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), and The Silence
(1963).^By the mid-1960s Bergman had assembled a group of actors into a now
familiar stock company, among them Max VON SYDOW, Liv ULLMANN, Harriet
Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, and Ingrid Thulin. In 1966 he
undertook a greater formal experimentation with Persona, an intriguing
psychological study of two women that is considered by many one of his most
important works. This was followed by a less successful Gothic exercise, Hour
of the Wolf (1968); an antiwar allegory, Shame (1968); and a more realistic
film, The Passion of Anna (1969). In the searing Cries and Whispers (1972),
Bergman again used Gothic and dreamlike elements, this time in an intense
exploration of the relationship among three sisters, but that film was followed
by the naturalistic simplicity of Scenes from a Marriage (1974), a great
popular success. Critics were less pleased with some of Bergman's later work,
finding the subject matter of Face to Face (1975) overly familiar and rating
his English-language The Serpent's Egg (1977) an overall failure. Autumn
Sonata (1978) and From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) were critical
successes, however, although the latter failed at the box office. Fanny and
Alexander (1983), a rich and fantastic portrait of childhood in a theatrical
family, was regarded as one of his finest films and won an Academy Award for
best foreign language film of 1983. Subsequently, Bergman directed After the
Rehearsal (1984), his meditation on a life in the theater. WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Bergman, Ingmar, Bergman on Bergman (1973); Cowie, Peter, Ingmar
Bergman: A Critical Biography (1982); Marker, Lise-Lone and Frederick J., Ingmar
Bergman; Four Decades in the Theater (1982); Mosley, Philip, Ingmar Bergman: The
Cinema as Mistress (1981); Petrie, Vlada, ed., Film and Dreams: An Approach to
Bergman (1981); Simon, John, Ingmar Bergman Directs (1972); Wood, Robin, Ingmar
Bergman (1969).
New Wave
--------------------------------
The term New Wave (in French, Nouvelle Vague) is used to identify the movement
and style of a group of French film directors, including Claude CHABROL, Jean
Luc GODARD, Alain RESNAIS, and Francois TRUFFAUT, who made their first feature
films between 1958 and 1961. Most wrote for the film journal CAHIERS DU CINEMA
and helped develop the auteur (director-oriented) theory of film criticism.
Rejecting traditional French film directing, they advocated instead the more
personal and autobiographical approach used in such films as Truffaut's The 400
Blows (1959). They also emulated American genre films, such as the detective
movie, and favored low-budget location shooting over studio filming. Visually,
they quoted from one another and employed mobile camera techniques and rapid
jump cuts, such as those found in Godard's Breathless (1959).
Bibliography: Graham, Peter J., comp., The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (1968).
Resnais, Alain 0re-nay'0
--------------------------------
Known for his innovative literary approach to film, Alain Resnais, b. June 3,
1922, became one of the leading directors of French NEW WAVE cinema when it
emerged in the late 1950s. Before his feature debut Resnais had spent 11 years
making brilliant documentary films on subjects ranging from the painter Van
Gogh (1948) and Picasso's Guernica (1950) to the manufacture of polystyrene
(1958) and the French National Library (1956). His most celebrated
documentary, however, remains Night and Fog (1955), an unforgettable look at
the Nazi extermination camp system.
All Resnais's full-length films are marked by a profound social concern and
precise visual style. Each has been made in collaboration with a writer who is
also a novelist or playwright of note, and each is characterized both by a
totally novel structure and by a fascination with the exploration of time and
memory, illusion and reality. Resnais's impact is shown by the way in which
all of his early collaborators--Marguerite Duras on Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959),
Alain Robbe-Grillet on Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Jean Cayrol on Muriel
(1963), and Jorge Semprun on La Guerre est finie (1966)--have gone on to direct
their own feature films. After a long break from filmmaking in the early
1970s, Resnais returned with two cool but exquisitely shot films, Stavisky
(1974) and Providence (1977). Mon Oncle d'Amerique (1981), made in
collaboration with screenwriter Jean Gruault, was critically and commercially
his most successful film since La Guerre est Finie. Resnais again teamed with
Gruault for La Vie Est un Roman (1983; trans. as Life Is a Bed of Roses). ROY
ARMES
Bibliography: Armes, Roy, The Cinema of Alain Resnais (1968); Monaco, James,
Alain Resnais (1978); Ward, John, Alain Resnais or the Theme of Time (1968).
Chabrol, Claude
--------------------------------
{shah-brawl'}^Claude Chabrol, b. June 24, 1930, is one of the original film
directors of French NEW WAVE cinema. He is best known for his thriller films
made in homage to Alfred Hitchcock, about whom he coauthored Hitchcock (1957).
Chabrol has also been a critic for the influential film journal Cahiers du
Cinema, and his first picture, Le Beau Serge (1958), is generally credited with
establishing the New Wave style. Other works of this skilled and prolific
filmmaker include Les Cousins (1958), Les Biches (1968), La Femme infidele
(1968), Le Boucher (1969), Juste avant la nuit (1971), Ophelia (1973), Folies
Bourgeoise (1977), Blood Relatives (1979), and Le Sang des Autres (1983).
Bibliography: Wood, Robin, and Walker, Michael, Claude Chabrol (1970).
Bertolucci, Bernardo
--------------------------------
(bair-toh-loo'-chee)
The Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci, b. Mar. 16, 1940, is
internationally known for such films as The Conformist (1970), a searing
portrait of fascism, and the controversial Last Tango in Paris (1972). He was
greatly influenced by his mentor, Pier Paolo PASOLINI. The later influence of
Jean-Luc GODARD is seen in Partner (1968) and that of Alain RESNAIS in The
Spider's Strategy (1970). Bertolucci's remarkable use of setting and his
precise camera movements, radical political viewpoint, and stringent
emotionalism have culminated in such other films as his 6-hour-long epic 1900
(1975). In Luna (1979), however, critics saw his camera moves as
overdeliberate, contrasting with the visually restrained moves of Tragedy of a
Ridiculous Man (1982). GAUTAM DASGUPTA
Bibliography: Gelmis, Joseph, The Film Director as Superstar (1970).
Godard, Jean Luc
--------------------------------
{goh-dahr', zhawn luek}^One of the most influential film directors of the
1960s, Jean Luc Godard, b. Paris, Dec. 3, 1930, of Swiss parents, is best
known for his innovative NEW WAVE films and for his increasingly radical
approaches to politics and art. His experimental use of the hand-held camera,
jump cuts, and flash-shots; his disregard for cinematic continuity; and his
recourse to question-and-answer sessions within films to illustrate
philosophical dialectics did much to revolutionize cinema.^A lively and
controversial contributor to the important journal Cahiers du Cinema from 1952
on, Godard made several shorts before directing his first feature, Breathless
(1959). In Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier, 1960), on the Algerian War,
and other films, Godard combined documentary with fictional footage in an
attempt to arrive at a truth beyond art or reality.^Godard's early films dealt
with the nature and contradictions of modern society. Of particular interest
to him was the place of women in society. Une Femme est une femme (A Woman is
a Woman, 1961), a film on male-female relationships with a happy ending, was
followed by the more biting and ironic My Life to Live (1962), on prostitution,
Une Femme mariee (A Married Woman, 1964), Masculin-Feminin (1966), and Two or
Three Things I Know About Her (1966). Their themes rested on the notion of
woman as object, but his approach brought into question the entire
commodity-advertising nexus of today's consumer society--as did his more
blatant attacks on materialism, Alphaville (1965) and Weekend (1968).^In the
late 1960s and early 1970s, Godard's work became increasingly experimental and
noncommercial. In such films as Made in USA (1966), La Chinoise (1967),
Sympathy for the Devil (1968), starring the Rolling Stones, and the
autobiographical Tout va bien (Everything's Fine, 1972), Godard subordinated
considerations of plot and pared down his visual imagery to a few static
tableaux and became increasingly devoted to Marxist polemics. Later, however,
Godard returned to commercial filmmaking with his Every Man for Himself (1981),
Passion (1983), First Name Carmen (1984) and Detective (1985). His treatment
of religious themes in Hail Mary (1985) generated much controversy. GAUTAM
DASGUPTA
Bibliography: Barr, Charles, et al., The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (1970); Brown,
Royal S., ed., Focus on Godard (1972); Collet, Jean, Jean-Luc Godard, trans. by
Ciba Vaughan, rev. ed. (1970); Kawin, Bruce F., Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and
the Language of First-Person Film (1978); Kriedl, John Francis, Jean-Luc Godard
(1980).
Malle, Louis
--------------------------------
(mahl)
Louis Malle, b. Oct. 30, 1932, is a French film director known for his
eclecticism, unconventional themes, and willingness to experiment. After
serving as an assistant to Jacques Cousteau and Robert Bresson, Malle in 1957
directed his first film, Frantic (French title: L'Ascenseur pour l'echafaud),
which introduced actress Jeanne Moreau and photographer Henri Decae to the
cinema-going public. With such later films as The Lovers (1958) and Zazie in
the Metro (1960), Malle came to be recognized as a director with an acute eye
for detail and characterization. The Fire Within (1963), a penetrating study
of an alcoholic, was followed by a musical-comedy romp set in revolutionary
Mexico, Viva Maria (1965), starring the surprising duo of Moreau and Brigitte
Bardot. Malle's refusal to indulge in psychology and his love of extremes in
human nature have prompted him to tackle--successfully and with humor--an
incestuous relationship between mother and son in Murmur of the Heart (1971)
and--with somewhat mixed results--child prostitution in Pretty Baby (1978).
Considered his finest film, the controversial Lacombe, Lucien (1974)
sympathetically portrays the life of a teenaged French collaborator with the
German army of occupation.
Malle has continued to demonstrate his versatility with such films as the
anti-heroic black comedy Atlantic City (1981; screenplay by John GUARE), about
has-beens who have lived their lives in a resort town and hopefuls who arrive
because of the casino boom. My Dinner with Andre (1982) consisted of two men
philosophizing over dinner about spirituality and the artist's role in society.
Crackers (1983) depicted a bumbling group of down-and-out thieves in San
Francisco. In 1982, Malle directed an off-Broadway production of Guare's play
Lydie Breeze. Malle has also made several highly regarded films on India.
GAUTAM DASGUPTA
Davis, Bette
--------------------------------
Bette Davis is the stage name of Ruth Elizabeth Davis, b. Apr. 5, 1908, for
many years one of Hollywood's most popular actresses. Known for her striking,
determined looks, distinctive voice, and outspoken press comments, Davis won
the Academy Award as best actress in Dangerous (1935) and Jezebel (1938).
Particularly acclaimed among Davis's many performances are her roles in Dark
Victory (1939), Elizabeth and Essex (1939), The Little Foxes (1941), Watch on
the Rhine (1943), All About Eve (1950), and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
(1962), in which she played an insane, aging child star. In recent years she
has primarily appeared in television films such as Little Gloria . . . Happy
at Last and A Piano for Mrs. Cimino (both 1982), and the pilot of the series
Hotel (1983). Davis received the Life Achievement Award of the American Film
Institute in 1976. LESLIE HALLIWELL
Bibliography: Hyman, B. D., My Mother's Keeper (1985); Ringgold, Gene, Films of
Bette Davis (1970); Stine, Whitney, Mother Goddam (1974); Vermilye, Jerry, Bette
Davis (1973)
Grant, Cary
--------------------------------
Cary Grant is the professional name of English-born Alexander Archibald Leach,
b. Jan. 18, 1904, who won world fame in dozens of Hollywood movies as the
quintessentially debonair, self-confident sophisticate. Appearing in films
from 1932 on, he played roles particularly suited to his talents in The Awful
Truth (1937) and My Favorite Wife (1940) opposite Irene Dunne, in The
Philadelphia Story (1940) with Katharine Hepburn, and in such Alfred Hitchcock
thrillers as Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955), and
North by Northwest (1959). Grant retired in 1970.
Bibliography: Deschner, Donald, The Films of Cary Grant (1973); Govoni, Albert,
Cary Grant (1971).
Cooper, Gary
--------------------------------
Gary Cooper, b. Helena, Mont., May 7, 1901, d. May 13, 1961, was the stage
name of Frank James Cooper, one of the most famous of Hollywood's film stars.
Known especially for his portrayals of strong, silent heroes, he won Academy
awards for two such characterizations: Sergeant York (1941) and High Noon
(1952). Cooper played variations on this role in films such as The Virginians
(1929), A Farewell to Arms (1933), The Plainsman (1937), Beau Geste (1939), For
Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), and The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955).
His lighter comic and romantic films include Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and
Love in the Afternoon (1957). LESLIE HALLIWELL
Gable, Clark
--------------------------------
Such was the brash charm of American film actor Clark Gable, b. Feb. 1, 1901,
d. Nov. 16, 1960, that for 30 years he was the undisputed king of Hollywood.
As a fast-talking he-man, he was noted for the force of his personality more
than for acting talent. Gable appeared in such classic films as Red Dust
(1932); It Happened One Night, for which he won the Academy Award (1934);
Mutiny On The Bounty (1935); San Francisco (1936); and, most notably, as Rhett
Butler in Gone With The Wind (1939). His postwar films were popular but far
less memorable. He died during the filming of The Misfits (1961). LESLIE
HALLIWELL
Bibliography: Tornabene, Lyn, Long Live the King (1977).
Sternberg, Josef von
--------------------------------
The films of Austrian-American director Josef von Sternberg, pseudonym of Jonas
Stern, b. Vienna, May 29, 1894, d. Dec. 22, 1969, are perhaps the supreme
example of the narrative film's pursuit of visual beauty at the expense of
dramatic values. Sternberg had his first popular success with Underworld
(1927), which was followed by The Docks of New York (1928) and Thunderbolt
(1929). Sternberg then went to Germany to direct The Blue Angel (1930), a
sensational success that inaugurated the director's long association with his
"discovery," Marlene DIETRICH. Their early films together--Morocco (1930),
Dishonoured (1931), and Shanghai Express (1932)--displayed the visual dynamism
that distinguished Sternberg's previous work, but this gradually gave way in
The Scarlet Empress (1934) and The Devil Is a Woman (1935) to increasingly
static and purely decorative glorifications of Dietrich's mystique. Following
the increasingly unpopular Dietrich cycle, Sternberg worked rarely, and, of his
later films, only The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Anatahan (1953) are notable.
His autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, appeared in 1965. WILLIAM S.
PECHTER
Bibliography: Baxter, John, The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg (1971); Sarris,
Andrew, The Films of Josef von Sternberg (1966); Weinberg, Herman, Josef von
Sternberg (1967).
Hawks, Howard
--------------------------------
In a career that stretched back to silent movies, the film director Howard
Hawks, b. Goshen, Ind., May 30, 1896, d. Dec. 26, 1977, contributed notably
to virtually every movie genre: the gangster film in Scarface (1932),
screwball comedy in Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), the war
film in The Dawn Patrol (1930) and Air Force (1943), action-adventure in To
Have and Have Not (1944), the private-eye film in The Big Sleep (1946), the
Western in Red River (1948), and the musical in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(1953). Whether Hawks's films live up to the largest claims of his admirers,
few other directors have better exemplified the virtues of the Hollywood
professional. Although his films typically concentrate on a group bound by
professionalism in some common endeavor, their enduring pleasure results less
from their subjects or themes than from a resolute unpretentiousness and brisk,
direct style. WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: McBride, Joseph, ed., Focus on Howard Hawks (1972); Willis,
Donald, The Films of Howard Hawks (1975); Wood, Robin, Howard Hawks (1968).
Capra, Frank
--------------------------------
The American film director Frank Capra, b. May 18, 1897, virtually created a
genre with his popular 1930s film comedies. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) was
the prototype for Capra's most characteristic films, in which an idealistic
innocent is pitted against the forces of corruption in an apparently hopeless
but ultimately victorious battle. Capra won Academy Awards for best direction
with It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds (1936), and You Can't Take It
With You (1938). With an ever-increasing stylistic virtuosity, he went on to
make Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), and It's A
Wonderful Life (1946). His Lost Horizon (1937) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1942)
also proved popular. He was in charge of the U.S. government's war
documentary series Why We Fight (1942-45). His autobiography, The Name Above
the Title, appeared in 1971. In 1982 he was given the Lifetime Achievement
Award of the American Film Institute.^ WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Glatzer, Richard, and Raeburn, John, eds., Frank Capra: The Man
and His Films (1975); Poague, Leland A., The Cinema of Frank Capra (1975);
Willis, Donald C., The Films of Frank Capra (1974).
Ford, John
--------------------------------
(playwright)
John Ford, b. Apr. 17, 1586, d. c.1630, was an English playwright, generally
considered the best of the late Stuart dramatists (1625-40). After writing
several nondramatic pieces, Ford collaborated with Thomas Dekker on The Witch
of Edmonton (1621). Among the seven intense, pessimistic tragedies he wrote on
his own are: The Lovers's Melancholy (1628), The Broken Heart (1633), 'Tis
Pity She's a Whore (1633), and Perkin Warbeck (1634). Influenced by Robert
Burton and contemporary Neoplatonism, Ford's drama deals with a variety of love
relationships. Although sometimes prurient, the plays in general are carefully
balanced in their presentation of questionable moral stances. W. L. GODSHALK
Bibliography: Anderson, Donald K., Jr., John Ford (1972); Leech, Clifford, John
Ford and the Drama of His Time (1957); Stavig, Mark, John Ford and the
Traditional Moral Order (1968).
Ford, John
--------------------------------
(film director)
John Ford was the name adopted by Sean Aloysius O'Feeny, b. Feb. 1, 1895, d.
Aug. 31, 1973, an American film director whose works are noted for their
sustained creativity, breadth of vision, and pictorial beauty. Ford began
directing Westerns in 1917, but his first great success was not until The Iron
Horse (1924), followed by another, Three Bad Men (1926). Thirteen more years
passed, however, before Ford, whose name became associated with the Western
film, would make another, Stagecoach (1939), still regarded as a classic of the
genre. In the intervening years he directed such varied works as Judge Priest
(1934), The Informer (1935), Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), and The Hurricane
(1937).
Stagecoach was followed by an outpouring of major works--Young Mr. Lincoln
(1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Long
Voyage Home (1940), and How Green Was My Valley (1941). These films celebrated
community life and were imbued with an elegiacal sense of the past. The war
years resulted in the first American war documentary, The Battle of Midway
(1942), and another of Ford's enduring works, They Were Expendable (1945).
After the war, Ford returned to the Western with the lyrical My Darling
Clementine (1946); a loose trilogy of cavalry life--Fort Apache (1948), She
Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950); and an innovative blending
of song and story in Wagonmaster (1950).
During the six years before Ford's next Western, he directed The Quiet Man
(1952)--a touching and humorous story of an Irish-American's return to his
homeland--and several other films. Returning to the Western with The Searchers
(1956), Ford revealed a new ambiguity in his vision of the American past.
Increasingly, in such later works as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), the exaltation of the civilizing of the West that
was seen in his earlier films was darkened by a regret over the loss of freedom
brought by civilization. During his career, Ford established and repeatedly
used a stock company of actors, including Henry Fonda, James Stewart, John
Wayne, and Ward Bond. WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Bogdanovich, Peter, John Ford (1968); McBride, Joseph, and
Wilmington, Michael, John Ford (1975); Place, J. A., The Western Films of John
Ford (1974) and The Non-Western Films of John Ford (1979); Sarris, Andrew, The
John Ford Movie Mystery (1975); Sinclair, Andrew, John Ford (1979).
Cagney, James
--------------------------------
A fast-talking Irish-American film actor who danced brilliantly and frequently
on screen, James Cagney, b. July 17, 1899, d. March 30, 1986, achieved fame
in Hollywood as a cocky gangster in Public Enemy (1931) and became stereotyped
for several years thereafter. His best roles, which reflect his punchy,
cheerful personality, were in Footlight Parade (1933), Lady Killer (1933),
G-Men (1935), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), Boy Meets Girl (1938), Angels
With Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), White Heat (1949), Love
Me or Leave Me (1955), Man of a Thousand Faces (as Lon Chaney, 1957), and One
Two Three (1961). He won an Academy Award for his performance as George M.
Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). At the age of 82, Cagney emerged from 20
years of retirement to make an acclaimed appearance in the film Ragtime (1981),
and the television film Terrible Joe Moran (1984). LESLIE HALLIWELL
Bibliography: Bergman, Andrew, James Cagney (1973); Cagney, James, Cagney by
Cagney (1976); McGilligan, Patrick, Cagney (1975).
Muni, Paul
--------------------------------
{myoo'-nee}^Paul Muni, b. Muni Weisenfreund in Lemberg, Austria (now Lvov,
USSR), Sept. 22, 1985, d. Aug. 25, 1967, was a character actor who became a
top Hollywood star in the 1930s. He went to the United States with his family
in 1907. As a young man, Muni gained experience touring with the Yiddish Art
Theatre company; he first brought his conscientious approach and animated
acting style to the screen in 1928. His powerful performances in films include
Scarface (1932), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), The Story of Louis
Pasteur (1936; Academy Award), The Good Earth (1937), The Life of Emile Zola
(1937), Juarez (1941), and The Last Angry Man (1959).
Robinson, Edward G.
--------------------------------
Edward G. Robinson, stage name of Emanuel Goldenberg, b. Romania, Dec. 12,
1893, d. Jan. 26, 1973, became one of the major figures of Hollywood films of
the 1930s. Short and dynamic, with a distinctive voice, he specialized in
gangster parts but later proved equally adept at comedy or in benevolent
character roles. His most important films include Little Caesar (1930), A
Slight Case of Murder (1938), Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), Double
Indemnity and The Woman in the Window (both 1944), and Key Largo (1948).
LESLIE HALLIWELL
Bibliography: Robinson, Edward G., and Spigelgass, Leonard, All My Yesterdays
(1975).
Chevalier, Maurice
--------------------------------
(shuh-vahl'-ee-ay)
Maurice Chevalier, b. Sept. 12, 1888, d. Jan. 1, 1972, was a debonair
French singer, actor, and dancer who for more than 50 years was a popular
international cabaret artist. He had two Hollywood careers: as a romantic
lead in such films as The Love Parade (1930), Love Me Tonight (1932), and
Folies Bergere (1935), and as an elderly character actor in Gigi (1958), Fanny
(1961), and In Search of the Castaways (1962). LESLIE HALLIWELL
Bibliography: Ringgold, Gene, and Bodeen, DeWitt, Chevalier: The Films and
Career of Maurice Chevalier (1973; 2d ed., 1975).
Berkeley, Busby
--------------------------------
{burk'-lee} Busby Berkeley was the pseudonym of William Berkeley Enos, b. Los
Angeles, Nov. 29, 1895, d. Mar. 14, 1976, a choreographer known for the
grandiose spectacles he created in the Hollywood musical extravaganzas of the
1930s. From success on the Broadway stage, Berkeley took his dance-directing
techniques to movies. The Berkeley trademark--kaleidoscopic patterns of massed
dancers filmed from above--is most strikingly displayed in the Eddie Cantor
vehicle Whoopee (1930) and in 42nd Street (1933), the Gold Diggers series
(1933, 1935, 1937, 1938), Roman Scandals (1933), Footlight Parade (1933), and
Babes in Arms (1939). His lead dancer was Ruby KEELER. WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Martin, Dave, and Pike, Bob, The Genius of Busby Berkeley (1973);
Terry, Jim, and Thomas, Tony, The Busby Berkeley Book (1973).
Astaire, Fred
--------------------------------
Fred Astaire is the stage name of Frederick Austerlitz, b. Omaha, Nebr., May
10, 1899, who brought new distinction to musical comedy with his elegant and
witty song and dance routines. First teamed with his sister Adele on the
stage, Astaire turned to Hollywood on her retirement from show business, making
his initial screen appearance in Dancing Lady (1933). His greatest success
came when he was paired with Ginger ROGERS in a series of romantic comedies
featuring their dance numbers. Flying Down to Rio (1933) was followed by The
Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta and Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet and Swing
Time (1936), Shall We Dance? (1937), and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
(1939). In 1949 they were reunited in The Barkleys of Broadway. With other
partners, Astaire starred in such musicals as Daddy Longlegs (1955) and Funny
Face (1957). He also appeared in dramatic roles. A perfectionist who often
choreographed his own dances, he received a special Academy Award in 1949 for
"raising the standards of all musicals." LESLIE HALLIWELL
Bibliography: Astaire, Fred, Steps in Time (1959); Croce, Arlene, The Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1972; repr. 1978); Freedland, Michael, Fred
Astaire: An Illustrated Biography (1977); Green, Stanley, and Goldblatt, Burt,
Starring Fred Astaire (1S973).
Rogers, Ginger
--------------------------------
Singer, actress, and dancer Ginger Rogers, b. Virginia McMath, Independence,
Mo., July 16, 1911, is best known for the movie musicals she made with Fred
ASTAIRE. After playing vaudeville as a teenager, she made her debut on
Broadway in 1929 and entered feature films in 1930.
The famous Rogers and Astaire dance team first starred in Flying Down to Rio
(1933) and developed their now classic routines in The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top
Hat (1935), and Swing Time (1936). Rogers, who also appeared in dramatic
roles, won an Academy Award for Kitty Foyle (1940). She made numerous films
during the next two decades and returned to the musical comedy stage in Hello,
Dolly (1965) and Mame (1969).
Bibliography: Croce, Arlene, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1978).
Huston, John
--------------------------------
{hue'-stuhn}^The son of actor Walter Huston, film director, writer, and actor
John Huston, b. Nevada, Mo., Aug. 5, 1906, made his dazzlingly auspicious
directorial debut with The Maltese Falcon (1941). For years, Huston's
reputation as one of the most strongly individualistic of American directors
was sustained through such films as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948),
The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1951), and Beat the Devil (1954).
Thereafter, he succumbed to pretentiousness and slipped into a decline. Signs
of his old form could occasionally be seen in such films as The Misfits (1961),
Fat City (1972), and Wise Blood (1979). Huston directed the film version of
the musical Annie (1982), and Prizzi's Honor (1985). As an actor, Huston was
notable in The Cardinal (1963), Chinatown (1974), Winter Kills (1979), and
Under the Volcano (1984). WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Huston, John, An Open Book (1980); Kaminsky, Stuart M., John
Huston: Maker of Magic (1978).
Wyler, William
--------------------------------
A three-time winner of the Academy Award for best director during the 1940s and
'50s, William Wyler, b. Alsace, July 1, 1902, d. July 27, 1981, was generally
regarded as the foremost craftsman among Hollywood directors. Wyler's long
association with producer Samuel Goldwyn resulted in a number of films based on
literary texts, including Dodsworth (1936), Dead End (1937), Wuthering Heights
(1939), and The Little Foxes (1941). Mrs. Miniver (1942) won Wyler his first
Academy Award, a success capped by that of the award-winning The Best Years of
Our Lives (1946), whose depiction of returning war veterans was praised for
having brought a new maturity to American films. Subsequent Wyler films of
note include The Heiress (1949), Detective Story (1951), Roman Holiday (1953),
Ben-Hur (1959), for which he received a third Academy Award, and Funny Girl
(1968). In recent years, however, Wyler had been criticized for the anonymity
of his style. WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Madsen, Axel, William Wyler (1973).
Sturges, Preston
--------------------------------
(stur'-jis)
For a time in the 1940s, Preston Sturges, pseudonym of Edmund P. Biden, b.
Chicago, Aug. 29, 1898, d. Aug. 6, 1959, held a position of creative
preeminence in Hollywood as a writer-director who was acclaimed by critics and
public alike. Sturges directed his first film, The Great McGinty, in 1940, and
followed it with a string of successes that included The Lady Eve (1941),
Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), and Hail the
Conquering Hero (1944), breakneck farces that shrewdly satirized American life.
But Sturges's touch seemed to falter with the semiserious The Great Moment
(1944), and the only time he returned to form afterwards, in the black comedy
Unfaithfully Yours (1948), the public failed to respond. WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Ursini, James, The Fabulous Life and Times of Preston Sturges
(1973).
Wilder, Billy
--------------------------------
{wyl'-dur}^Whether comedies or melodramas, the films of American
writer-director Billy Wilder, b. Vienna, June 22, 1906, have been
distinguished by their cynicism and sophistication. Wilder established his
talent for farce with the first Hollywood film he directed, The Major and the
Minor (1942), and his mastery of film noir with the corrosive thriller Double
Indemnity (1944). Subsequent films in the acidulous Wilder mode include the
Academy Award-winning The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Ace
in the Hole (1951). Wilder's later work includes such popular comedies as Some
Like It Hot (1959) The Apartment (1960), Irma La Douce (1963), The Fortune
Cookie (1966), The Front Page (1974), and Buddy Buddy (1981). In 1986 he
received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award. WILLIAM S.
PECHTER
Bibliography: Madsen, Axel, Billy Wilder (1969).
Welles, Orson
--------------------------------
Although the American actor-director Orson Welles, b. Kenosha, Wis., May 6,
1915, d. Oct. 10, 1985, worked on the stage and i n films for nearly 50
years, his fame rests principally on two projects he completed before he was 30
years of age. The first, his 1938 radio adaptation for the Mercury Theatre of
H.G. Wells's T he War of the Worlds, created a panic among listeners who
believed it was a report of an actual Martian invasion. The second was his
first and greatest film, the extraordinary Citizen Kane (1941). A character
study loosely modeled on the life of publisher William Randolph HEARST, it
embroiled Welles in legal battles, won Acade my Awards for him and cowriter
Herman Mankiewicz, and established h is reputation as Hollywood's boy wonder.
Beginning as an actor with Dublin's Gate Theatre (1931), Welles soon turned to
writing and directing, producing a notable all-black version of Macbeth in 1936
before founding the Mercury Theatre w ith John Houseman in 1937. After the
double triumph of War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane, he directed The
Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1948), and a new Macbeth
(1948) before moving to Europe, where many of his subsequent films, beginning
with Mr. Arkadin (1955), were made. Touch of Evil (1 958) is a shadowy
American FILM NOIR. The Trial (1962) is a bleak adaptation of Kafka. Chimes
at Midnight (1966), a study of Falstaff, and the unfinished Don Quixote
(1957-66) reflect Welle s's fascination with extravagant, outsize characters,
many of whom he himself played to perfection.
Welles starred in many of his own films, but his screen credits also include
distinguished performances in Jane Eyre (1944), The Thir d Man (1949), Moby
Dick (1956), A Man for All Seasons (1966), and Catch-22 (1970). His career,
marked by grandiose projects and inimitable posturing, was honored in 1975 by
the American Film Institute, which presented him its Life Achievement Award.
THAD DEUS TULEJA
Bibliography: Bazin, Andre, Orson Welles: A Critical View, tra ns. by
Jonathan Rosenbaum (1978); Brady, Frank, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson
Welles (1987); Cowie, Peter, The Cinema of O rson Welles (1978); Gottesman,
Ronald, ed., Focus on Orson Welles (1976); Higham, Charles, The Films of Orson
Welles (1970); Leaming, Barbara, Welles: A Biography (1985).
Hollywood Ten, The
--------------------------------
The Hollywood Ten were a group of producers, writers, and directors called
before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (see UN-AMERICAN
ACTIVITIES, HOUSE COMMITTEE ON) in October 1947 as "unfriendly" witnesses
during the investigation of Communist influence in Hollywood. Alvah Bessie,
Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., Herbert
Biberman, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Albert Maltz, and Edward Dmytryk refused
to state whether or not they were Communists. All served prison sentences and
were blacklisted in the film industry.
Bibliography: Goodman, Walter, The Committee: Extraordinary Career of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities (1968); Hellman, Lillian, Scoundrel Time
(1976); Kahn, Gordon, Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the Ten Who Were Indicted
(1948; repr. 1972).
Polanski, Roman
--------------------------------
{poh-lan'-skee}^The Polish film director and actor Roman Polanski, b. Paris,
Aug. 18, 1933, was brought up in Krakow by foster parents after the internment
of his parents in a Nazi concentration camp. After World War II he became a
student (1954-59) at the Polish State Film School at Lodz. His first feature
film, Knife in the Water (1962), a subtle treatment of sexual tension, presaged
more explicit treatments of sexuality in Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-Sac
(1966). With Rosemary's Baby (1968), Polanski established himself as a master
of macabre horror. After the 1969 murder of his wife, the actress Sharon Tate,
by the Charles Manson gang, he moved to France to become a French citizen, but
returned to the United States to make Chinatown (1974). In 1977 he was
indicted in Los Angeles for a sexual offense but has since lived in France,
where he made Tess (1979). In 1981 he directed and played the title role in
his own Warsaw production of Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus. His autobiography
Roman was published in 1984.
Bibliography: Butler, Ivan, The Cinema of Roman Polanski (1970).
Wajda, Andrzej
--------------------------------
{vy'-dah, an'-jay}
The distinguished Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, b. Mar. 6, 1927, rose to
fame with a trilogy--A Generation (1954), Kanal (1956), and Ashes and Diamonds
(1958)--that vividly reflected the experience of an entire generation in
postwar Poland. Although Wajda evinced versatility in later films, his most
powerful work is historical-political. Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron
(1981) use historical contexts to inveigh against such contemporary oppressions
as the secret police, the Communist party, and factory bosses. Danton (1983)
views the French Revolution through the personalities of its leaders. A Love
in Germany (1984) explores the madness of sexual passion within the context of
the political madness of Nazi Germany.
Bibliography: Michatek, B., The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda (1973); Paul, D. ed.,
Politics, Art, and Commitment in East European Cinema (1984).
Forman, Milos
--------------------------------
The Czech-born film director Milos Forman, b. Feb. 18, 1932, is noted for his
powers of observation and his subtle, ironic humor. He won the 1975 Academy
Award as best director for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, adapted from the
1962 novel by Ken Kesey. He won the 1984 Academy Award for Amadeus. Even
though both of Forman's parents died in German concentration camps, his work
shows a remarkable optimism. Forman's other films include the Czech-made Peter
and Pavla (1964) and Loves of a Blonde (1965) and the American-made Taking Off
(1971), Hair (1979), and Ragtime (1981). ROY ARMES
Bibliography: Whittemore, Don, et. al., Passport to Hollywood (1976).
Herzog, Werner
--------------------------------
(hair'-tsohk)
Werner Herzog is the professional name of Werner H. Stipetic, b. 1942, a
German filmmaker known for his eye for remote, exotic scenery and his
attraction for extremes of character: the mad Amazon explorer Aguirre
(Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1973); the mute isolate Kasper Hauser (The Mystery
of Kasper Hauser, 1975); dwarfs and midgets (Even Dwarfs Started Small, 1970);
or men in the grip of obsession (Fitzcarraldo, 1982). Herzog writes the
screenplays for all of his films. His large output includes a number of
documentaries, the most admired of which have been Land of Silence and Darkness
(1971), about the life of a blind, deaf woman; and La Soufriere (1977), a
portrait of an abandoned region near a smoldering volcano in Guadaloupe.
Bibliography: Eder, Richard, "New Visionary in German Films," New York Times
Magazine, July 10, 1977.
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner
--------------------------------
{fahs'-bin-dur, ry'-nur vair'-nur}^Rainer Werner Fassbinder, b. May 31, 1946,
d. June 10, 1982, was one of Germany's greatest and most prolific film
directors as well as a stage and screen actor and scriptwriter. He joined the
Munich Action Theater in 1967 and began making films two years later, using a
permanent ensemble of experienced actors. Fassbinder's work reflects the
influence of Bertolt Brecht and Karl Marx, and of Freudian psychology; his
choice of material was influenced by the American filmmaker Douglas Sirk. His
subject matter ranges from the failure of friends to communicate, as portrayed
in Katzelmacher (1969), to the dullness of daily existence, depicted in Warum
lauft Herr R. Amok? (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, 1969) and Die bittren
Tranen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972).
Particularly admired are the bittersweet Der Handler der vier Jahreszeiten
(Merchant of the Four Seasons, 1971), the stylish Effi Breist, and Ali: Angst
essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974), a study in adversity.
Fassbinder's Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975), released in English as Fox and his
Friends, created a new wave of interest in his films in both the United States
and Europe. In 1978, Fassbinder released his first English language film,
Despair, starring Dirk Bogarde. His most commercially successful films were
The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Veronika Voss (1982), Querelle (released
1983), and the 15 hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (released 1983) which portrays
life in Berlin between the World Wars. GAUTAM DASGUPTA
Weir, Peter
--------------------------------
the work of the Australian film director Peter Lindsay Weir, b. June 21, 1944,
is part of a new wave of Australian filmmaking. Couched in a style that is
easily associated with American filmmaking--well-crafted plots, convincing
characters, and naturalistic dialogue--Weir's films have gained international
recognition. Weir, who was the director of Film Australia from 1969 to 1973,
sees himself primarily as a storyteller. He has directed such imaginative and
highly provocative films as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave
(1977), and The Plumber (1978). With the successes of these earlier films,
Weir has directed larger budgeted productions, including Gallipoli (1980) and
The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), which was filmed mostly outside of
Australia. Witness (1985), set among the Pennsylvania Amish, was filmed on
location.
Kubrick, Stanley
--------------------------------
{koob'-rik}^Stanley Kubrick, b. New York City, July 26, 1928, is an American
film writer, director, and producer with a virtually legendary status as an
idiosyncratic master. While working as a photojournalist for Life magazine,
Kubrick made an inconspicuous entrance into filmmaking with Fear and Desire
(1953) and Killer's Kiss (1955). After his crime thriller The Killing (1956),
critics began to take notice of his taut, brilliant style and bleakly cynical
outlook. Paths of Glory (1957) solidified his reputation as a filmmaker
interested in depicting the individual at the mercy of a hostile world. In
Spartacus (1960), Kubrick met the challenge of bringing a costume spectacle to
the screen. Lolita (1962), based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, received
mixed reviews. But Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb (1963), was enthusiastically hailed for its black-comedy vision
of atomic-age apocalypse. His 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork
Orange (1971), both made in England where Kubrick has worked since 1961,
engendered intense critical controversy, but the former has now become widely
accepted as a landmark in modern cinema. Although Barry Lyndon (1975) failed
to attract as large an audience as the previous two films, the Kubrick legend
of obsessive perfectionism and reclusive genius remains undiminished. In 1980
he directed the film version of Stephen King's The Shining. WILLIAM S.
PECHTER
Bibliography: Kagan, Norman, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick (1972); Nelson,
Thomas Allan, Kubrick: Inside A Film Artists Maze (1982); Phillips, Gene,
Stanley Kubrick: A Film Odyssey (1975); Walker, Alexander, Stanley Kubrick
Directs, rev. ed. (1972).
Altman, Robert B.
--------------------------------
Robert B. Altman, b. Kansas City, Mo., Feb. 20, 1925, won widespread
recognition as the trend-setting directorial stylist in American films of the
1970s. He did extensive work in television and directed four little-known
features before making M*A*S*H (1970), the film that first brought him critical
and popular acclaim. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973),
and California Split (1974) drew increasing attention for their textural
richness, multilayered soundtracks, and improvisatory flow. Prominent too was
Altman's debunking of the myths of various film genres, from the Western to the
private eye. With Nashville (1975) Altman had his second commercial success.
Critics saw less quality in such films as Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976),
3 Women (1977), and Quintet (1979) but praised Thieves Like Us (1974) and
Health (1980). Altman's recent films have been adaptations of plays: Come
Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), which he had directed on
Broadway; and Streamers (1983), David Rabe's drama. WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Kass, Judith, Robert Altman: American Innovator (1978).
Coppola, Francis Ford
--------------------------------
{koh'-puh-luh}^Francis Ford Coppola, b. Detroit, Apr. 7, 1939, directed the
highly successful film The Godfather (1972). He had previously directed
Dementia 13 (1962), You're a Big Boy Now (1966), Finian's Rainbow (1968), and
The Rain People (1969), a sensitive study of a runaway wife, which some
consider his best film. Coppola departed from the florid style of The
Godfather, for the spareness of The Conversation (1974), then enlarged on his
earlier hit with a sequel, The Godfather, Part II (1974). For five years
Coppola worked amid controversy and speculation on Apocalypse Now (1979), a
realistically violent depiction of the Vietnam War. Another Coppola film
generating controversy was the romantic comedy One From the Heart (1982). The
$26-million film was a financial and artistic failure. In 1983, Coppola
received mixed critical reactions to the Outsiders and Rumble Fish, both based
on stories by S. E. Hinton. The Cotton Club (1984), was a lavish production
set in New York City in the 1920s. WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Allen, Woody
--------------------------------
Woody Allen is the stage name of Allen Stewart Konigsberg, b. Brooklyn, N.Y.,
Dec. 1, 1935. He is considered America's best living film comedian and one of
its finest film directors. Alle n's highly personal work focuses on the fears
and insecurities experienced in contemporary society. His persona is that of a
bespectacled neurotic analyzing the recurrent themes of life, de ath, love,
religion and psychology. While a teenager, Allen worked a s a gag writer for a
public relations agency. He dropped out of col lege in 1953 and became a
principal writer for celebrities such as Si d Caesar and Garry Moore. His
switch to stand-up comedy in the ea rly 1960s led to celebrity status from
television appearances and th ree popular record releases. Allen made his
screen debut as an actor-screenwriter in What's N ew, Pussycat? (1965). His
first film project as director-writer-st ar was Take the Money and Run (1969).
His other movies include Ban anas (1971), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death
(1975), Annie Hall (1977) , which received four Academy Awards in 1978,
Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979), Stardust Memories (1980), A Midsummer
Night's Sex Comedy (1982), Zelig (1983), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), The Pur
ple Rose of Cairo (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Radio Da ys (1987).
Allen's comic and satirical writings have been collecte d in three anthologies,
Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1975), and Side Effects (1980). He has
also written several Broadway plays , the successful Don't Drink the Water
(1966; film, 1969) and Pla y It Again, Sam (1969; film, 1972), and the
unsuccessful The Floatin g Lightbulb (1981). FRANK MANCHEL
Bibliography: Allen, Woody, Four Films of Woody Allen (1982); Hirsh, Foster,
Love, Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life: Woody
Allen's Comedy (1981); Jacobs, Diane, But We Need the Eggs: Th e Magic of
Woody Allen (1982).
Lucas, George
--------------------------------
The American film director, screenwriter, and producer George Lucas, b.
Modesto, Calif., May 14, 1944, is best known for his trilogy of space fantasy
films Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1981), and Return of the Jedi
(1983). Following the adventures of such characters as Luke Skywalker,
Princess Leia, Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Darth Vader, as well as the
anthropomorphic robots R2-D2 and C-3PO, the trilogy spawned a multibillion
dollar industry of Star Wars-related products, including video games, dolls,
toys, books, and clothing.^After attending Modesto Junior College, Lucas
studied film at the University of Southern California, where a film he made won
first prize in the Third National Student Film Festival (1965). Lucas reworked
that film, a science-fiction fantasy that portrayed a grim, dehumanized world,
as his first feature, THX-1138 (1971). Lucas enjoyed his first major success
with American Graffiti (1973), a nostalgic look at American adolescence in the
early 1960s, which he both directed and coauthored. As executive producer and
coauthor of the original story, Lucas teamed with director Steven SPIELBERG to
make Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its sequel, Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom (1984).
Spielberg, Steven
--------------------------------
Steven Spielberg, b. Cincinnati, Ohio, Dec. 18, 1947, the director of E.T.:
The Extra-Terrestrial (see E.T.)--the most successful box-office attraction in
Hollywood history--has had a streak of movie blockbusters, establishing him as
one of the most popular American film directors. As a student at Long Beach
State College, Spielberg made a 16-mm short, Amblin' (1969), that won awards at
the Venice and Atlanta film festivals. After working in television for several
years, he made his first feature film, The Sugarland Express (1974). The movie
was a limited success, but the following year Spielberg made Jaws (1975), which
set box-office records. It was followed by Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977), a science-fiction fantasy, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), an
outlandish adventure tale, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), a
sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark. In 1985 he directed the film version of
Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and produced (as well as directed) episodes of
the television series "Amazing Stories".
Newman, Paul
--------------------------------
Paul Newman, b. Shaker Heights, Ohio, Jan. 26, 1925, is an actor whose charm
and wit made him one of the most popular film personalities of the 1960s and
'70s. After training at the Yale School of Drama, he achieved success on the
stage in Picnic (1953) and screen stardom in The Long Hot Summer (1958). His
most notable screen roles have been in The Hustler (1961), Sweet Bird of Youth
(1962), Hud (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(1969), The Sting (1973), Absence of Malice (1981), and The Verdict (1982).
Newman has directed several films including The Effect of Gamma Rays on
Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), The Shadow Box, and Harry and Son (1984)
which he also wrote and produced. He is married to actress Joanne Woodward.
After his son Scott died (1978) from a drug overdose, he established (1980) the
Scott Newman Foundation, which produces such educational films as Doin' What
the Crowd Does (1982). He is also active in the antinuclear movement and child
welfare.
Bibliography: Godfrey, Lionel, Paul Newman, Superstar (1979).
Redford, Robert
--------------------------------
One of Hollywood's most popular leading men, Charles Robert Redford, Jr., b.
Santa Monica, Calif., Aug. 18, 1937, had his first success on Broadway in Neil
Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1963; film, 1967).^Redford's reputation soared
with such movies as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting
(1973), in which he portrayed roguish but lovable crooks. His other films
include Jeremiah Johnson and The Candidate (both 1972), The Way We Were (1973),
The Great Gatsby (1974), All the President's Men (1976), The Electric Horseman
(1979), The Natural (1984), and Out of Africa (1985). He made his debut as a
director in 1980 with the film Ordinary People, which won three Academy Awards,
one of which went to Redford as best director. Redford is also active in
environmentalist causes.
De Niro, Robert
--------------------------------
Robert De Niro, b. New York City, Aug. 17, 1943, is an American film actor
known especially for his roles in the films of director Martin SCORSESE. These
include Mean Streets (1973); Taxi Driver (1976); the musical New York, New York
(1977); Raging Bull (1980), for which De Niro won an Academy Award; and the
King of Comedy (1982). He played the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather,
Part II (1974) and won an Academy Award for his performance. Among his other
important films are Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), The Deer Hunter (1978), True
Confessions (1981), Falling In Love and Once Upon A Time In America (both
1984), and Brazil (1985).
Scorcese, Martin
--------------------------------
{skawr-say'-zee}^The director Martin Scorcese, b. Queens, N.Y., Nov. 17,
1942, has won wide critical acclaim both for his controversial films portraying
violent themes and for his films focusing on lighter, entertaining subjects.
Scorcese, who grew up in Manhattan's Lower East Side, studied and later taught
filmmaking at New York University. He wrote and directed his first feature
film, Who's That Knocking at My Door?, in 1968. He worked on Street Scenes,
Woodstock, and other counterculture films before turning out a second feature,
a low-budget thriller called Boxcar Bertha (1972). His next film, however,
Mean Streets (1973), a grim story of mob involvement in Little Italy, won
critical acclaim. It also brought him studio support for Alice Doesn't Live
Here Anymore (1975) and Taxi Driver (1976). Scorcese next directed a frothy
musical, New York, New York (1977), and a rock documentary, The Last Waltz
(1978), in which he appeared. After Raging Bull (1980), in which Robert
DENIRO--with whom Scorsese has worked closely--portrayed prizefighter Jake
LaMotta, Scorcese turned to satire with The King of Comedy (1983) starring
DeNiro and Jerry Lewis. In 1985 he directed After Hours, a black comedy that
takes place in New York City.
Hoffman, Dustin
--------------------------------
The American actor Dustin Hoffman, b. Los Angeles, Aug. 8, 1937, one of the
most versatile film stars of his generation, was a modestly successful Broadway
and television actor until his appearance in Mike Nichols's film The Graduate
(1967). Since then he has created an extraordinary range of characterizations,
including a derelict in Midnight Cowboy (1969), a convict in Papillon (1973),
the comedian Lenny Bruce in Lenny (1974), and the journalist Carl Bernstein in
All the President's Men (1976). He won a 1980 Academy Award for best actor for
his performance in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), and an Academy Award nomination
for his spirited and sensitive rendition of an unemployed actor who assumes the
identity of a woman in order to land a role (Tootsie, 1982). In 1984 he
returned to the stage as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
(television play, 1985).
Nicholson, Jack
--------------------------------
Jack Nicholson, b. Neptune, N.J., Apr. 22, 1937, is an actor, director, and
producer whose raffish, cynical wit made him a popular offbeat hero in numerous
films. After gaining recognition for his performance as an alcoholic civil
liberties lawyer in Easy Rider (1969), he starred in such films as Five Easy
Pieces (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), The Last Detail (1974), Chinatown
(1974), The Passenger (1975), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1976), which won
him an Academy Award for best actor, The Shining (1980), and The Postman Always
Rings Twice (1981). His portrayal of Eugene O'Neill in Reds (1981) was highly
acclaimed, and for his rendition of an aging, alcoholic astronaut in the 1983
film Terms of Endearment he won an Academy Award for best supporting actor.
His performance as a Mafia "hit man" in Prizzi's Honor (1985) also won praise.
Bibliography: Braithwaite, Bruce, The Films of Jack Nicholson, ed. by David
Castell (1978).
Pacino, Al
--------------------------------
{puh-chee'-noh}^Alfred Pacino, b. New York City, Apr. 25, 1940, in a
relatively short time established himself solidly as an actor on both stage and
screen. His role in The Indian Wants the Bronx earned him a 1968 Obie Award,
and his Broadway debut in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? (1969) brought him a
Tony Award. Highly regarded for his 1972 film portrayal of the young Michael
Corleone in The Godfather, Pacino followed with successful film performances in
Serpico (1973), The Godfather, Part II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Bobby
Deerfield (1977), And Justice for All (1979), Cruising (1980), Author! Author!
(1982), Scarface (1983), and Revolution (1986). In 1981, and again in 1983,
Pacino won high acclaim for his performance in the off-Broadway revival of
American Buffalo.
Streep, Meryl
--------------------------------
The American actress Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep, b. Summit, N.J., June 22,
1949, is a versatile performer who has won acclaim in stage, film, and
television productions. Streep earned a master of fine arts at Yale
University, where she appeared at the Yale Repertory Theatre, and since 1975
has appeared in New York Shakespeare Festival productions. Other stage roles
include a highly acclaimed performance on Broadway in the Tennessee Williams
play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1976). Among her television credits is the
miniseries "Holocaust" (1978), for which she won an Emmy Award. Streep made
her film debut in Julia (1977) and appeared next in the award-winning movie The
Deer Hunter (1978), Manhattan (1979), The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), The
French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), and Still of the Night (1982). She has won
two Academy Awards, one as best supporting actress for her performance in
Kramer vs. Kramer (1980) and another as best actress for her portrayal of the
tragic heroine in Sophie's Choice (1982), based on the William Styron novel.
Streep played the title role in Silkwood (1983), which was based on the true
story of Karen Silkwood whose attempted expose' of the dangers of a plutonium
plant was ended by her mysterious death. In 1984 she co-starred with Robert De
Niro in Falling In Love, followed by two films in 1985; Plenty and Out of
Africa, a film based on the memoirs of Danish writer Karen Blixen, who assumed
the pen name Isak Dinesen.
Wiseman, Fred
--------------------------------
A former lawyer and professor, Frederick Wiseman, b. Boston, Jan. 1, 1930,
makes controversial documentary films about public, tax-supported institutions,
through which he reveals the more general attitudes of U.S. society.
Wiseman's free-form, nonnarrative method involves filming hours of footage in
which no one is told how to act and subsequently creating a structure through
extensive editing. Wiseman made his first film, Titicut Follies (1967), at a
Massachusetts institution for the criminally insane; his later films include
High School (1968), Law and Order (1969)--which portrays the police--Hospital
(1970), and Welfare (1975).
Bibliography: Atkins, Thomas R., ed., Frederick Wiseman (1976); Levin, G. Roy,
Documentary Explorations (1971).
Ophuls, Marcel
--------------------------------
(oh'-fuls)
Marcel Ophuls, b. Frankfurt, Germany, Nov. 1, 1927, is a French film director
known for his lengthy, probing documentaries. The son of director Max Ophuls,
he grew up in Germany, France, and Hollywood, where in the 1950s he learned
filmmaking from his father and John Huston. After making a comic feature,
Banana Peel, in 1963, he turned his attention to documentary, achieving
critical success with The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), a moving 4 1/2-hour-long
examination of French attitudes during the Nazi occupation; the movie was
originally banned by the de Gaulle government from French television because of
its controversial content. In the United States it received a special award
from the National Society of Film Critics. A Sense of Loss focused on the war
in Northern Ireland, and in 1976, Ophuls presented The Memory of Justice, an
investigation of ideals of justice in the context of the Nuremberg war crimes
trials and the war in Vietnam.
Bibliography: Wood, M., "Decent Man, Indecent Subject," New York Times Magazine,
October 17, 1976.
Brakhage, Stan
--------------------------------
(brak'-ij)
Stan Brakhage, b. Jan. 14, 1933, is an American experimental filmmaker whose
lyric films have contributed radically to the nonnarrative form. In such
essays as "Metaphors on Vision" published in Film Culture (1963), he explained
his concern with the drama of subconscious seeing. Brakhage's usually silent
films use multiple superimpositions, rapid montage, and fragmentary editing.
Other works include Anticipation of the Night (1958), Mothlight (1963), and his
major work, Dog Star Man (1961-65). LESLIE CLARK
SE LUMIER
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Lumiere, Louis and Auguste
--------------------------------
(loo-mee-air')
Louis Jean Lumiere, b. Oct. 5, 1864, d. June 6, 1948, and Auguste Marie Lumiere,
b. Oct. 19, 1862, d. Apr. 10, 1954, were French inventors of an early
motion-picture projector and pioneer filmmakers. The two brothers took over
management of their father's photographic supply factory in Lyons in 1893. There
Louis developed (1895) the Cinematographe, a single machine that functioned both
as camera and projector. Its unique feature was a system of claws that moved the
film mechanically but held each frame long enough for viewers to perceive the
image.
The Cinematographe was first demonstrated before a paying audience in Paris on
Dec. 28, 1895, with the showing of 10 of the brothers' films, including Workers
Leaving a Factory and a comic sequence, The Sprinkler Sprinkled. The public
exhibition marked the beginning of cinema history. In the next few years the
Lumieres continued to produce short, 2-minute films that were records of
everyday life; they also made documentaries, newsreels, and a historical film,
The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (1897).
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Bibliography: Quigley, Martin, Jr., Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of
Motion Pictures (1969).
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Rossellini, Roberto
--------------------------------
(rohs-sel-lee'-nee)
One of the principal founders of Italian neorealism, film director Roberto
Rossellini, b. May 8, 1906, d. June 3, 1977, first achieved prominence with Open
City (1945), filmed during and after the German evacuation of Rome and
portraying Italian resistance groups and Gestapo reprisals. The film had an
unprecedented immediacy, owing in large part to Rossellini's use of authentic
settings and of the physical presences of such fine performers as Anna Magnani
and Aldo Fabrizzi. Rossellini's success continued with the anecdotal Paisan
(1946), the stark Germany Year Zero (1947), and the controversial The Miracle
(1948). After Stromboli (1949), which carried his reliance on realistic settings
to excess, Rossellini made only one film of note during the next decade--Saint
Francis (1950). He returned to his former brilliance with General della Rovere
(1959). Since 1962, Rossellini worked exclusively in theater and television.
GAUTAM DASGUPTA
Bibliography: Guarner, Jose L., Roberto Rossellini, trans. by Elisabeth Cameron
(1970).
Last page !SE PRORNOGRAPHY
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pornography
--------------------------------
Pornography, or obscenity (which is the legal term), is any material, pictures,
films, printed matter, or devices dealing with sexual poses or acts considered
indecent by the public. Traditionally, the distribution and sale of pornography
has been illegal in most countries. Only in Denmark have all restrictions on
pornography been withdrawn (since 1969).
Although Massachusetts had antiobscenity laws in colonial times, federal
antipornography legislation in the United States was not passed until 1842.
Sending such matter through the mails became illegal in 1865. Late in the
century enforcement of the laws was vigorous, due largely to the efforts of
Anthony COMSTOCK and the Committee for the Suppression of Vice. In Great
Britain the first antipornography legislation, the Obscene Publications Act, was
passed in 1857.
Defining pornography has from the beginning proved to be a complex legal problem
because public attitudes change; materials considered pornographic in Victorian
society may not be considered remarkable today. Thus the enforcement of the
antipornography laws has involved suppression of several works of literature
currently regarded as masterpieces, including the novels Ulysses, by James
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Joyce, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D. H. Lawrence. Several obscenity
cases have been brought before the U.S. Supreme Court. In ROTH V. UNITED
STATES (1957), the Court affirmed for the first time the traditional position
that pornography was "not within the area of constitutionally protected speech."
The Court attempted, however, to establish legal guidelines for defining
obscenity. A three-part definition of obscenity evolved with reference to Roth:
matter that appeals to prurient interests, offends current standards, and has no
redeeming social value. In 1973 (in MILLER V. CALIFORNIA and four companion
cases) the Court reversed earlier decisions; it ruled that the matter could be
left to the discretion of individual states where "contemporary community
standards" were to be applied in judging whether or not material is
pornographic.
In 1982 the Supreme Court upheld a New York statute prohibiting the production
and sale of materials depicting children in sexually explicit situations. Child
pornography was thus added to the category of "speech" that is not protected by
the First Amendment.
Bibliography: Clor, Harry M., Obscenity and Public Morality (1969);
Donnerstein, Edward, Linz, Daniel, and Penrod, Steven, The Question of
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Pornography (1987); Eysenck, Hans J., and Nias, D. K. B., Sex, Violence and
the Media (1978); Griffin, Susan, Pornography and Silence (1981); Lewis,
Felix, F., Literature, Obscenity and the Law (1976); Rembar, Charles, The End
of Obscenity (1968); Sobel, Lester A., ed., Pornography, Obscenity, and the Law
(1978).
See also: CENSORSHIP.
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COMSTOCK
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Comstock, Anthony
--------------------------------
Anthony Comstock, b. Mar. 7, 1844, d. Sept. 21, 1915, was an American morals
crusader against obscene literature. In 1873 he founded the New York Society for
the Suppression of Vice and also secured stricter U.S. postal laws against
obscene materials. The playwright George Bernard Shaw coined the word
comstockery to describe opposition to realism in art and literature.
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film noir
--------------------------------
(film nwar)
Film noir, a term meaning "dark cinema," was first used by French critics to
describe a genre of American suspense film of the 1940s and '50s whose urban,
often nighttime settings and fatalistic themes suggested an unstable world full
of danger and moral corruption. The oblique lighting and off-balance
compositions typical of the visual style of such films reflected the ambience of
disillusionment and bitter realism. Famous examples of film noir include The
Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and The Big Heat (1953).
Bibliography: Silver, Alain, and Wald, Elizabeth, eds., Film Noir: An
Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (1978).
Last page !SE PUDOVKIN
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Pudovkin, Vsevolod I.
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(poo-dawf'-kin, fsev'-uh-luht)
Excited by D. W. Griffith's Intolerance when it was shown in Moscow in 1919,
Soviet filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin, b. Feb. 28 (N.S.), 1893, d. June 30, 1953,
abandoned a career in chemistry for the cinema. In 1922 he joined the
experimental film workshop of Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970). The first films Pudovkin
directed were Chess Fever (1925), a short, witty comedy; Mechanics of the Brain
(1925-26), an instructional film on Pavlov's experiments; and Mother (1926), a
worldwide success that dealt with the 1905 revolution. His best-known works were
the admirably photographed and edited The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Storm
over Asia (1928).
Pudovkin's transition to sound was not a happy one, Soviet sound equipment in
the early 1930s not being sophisticated enough for the experiments he had
planned. Although his later films on historical subjects were popular,
Pudovkin's fame abroad rests largely on his silent films and on his manual, Film
Technique and Film Acting (1929; Eng. trans., 1933). JAY LEYDA
Bibliography: Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (1973).
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Dovzhenko, Alexander
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(dohv-zhen'-koh)
Alexander Dovzhenko, b. Sept. 11 (N.S.), 1894, d. Nov. 25, 1956, was an
important early Soviet filmmaker. The son of peasants, he worked as a school
teacher, diplomat, and political cartoonist before turning to filmmaking in
1926. The first notable film he directed was the political allegory Zvenigora
(1928). Thereafter, his work was strictly censored. His principal films include
Arsenal (1929), dealing with the Civil War in the Ukraine; Earth (1930), on the
national struggle over collectivization; and the lyrical Shchors (1939). During
World War II, Dovzhenko produced such distinguished documentaries as Liberation
(1940) and Ukraine in Flames (1945).
Bibliography: Carynnyk, Marco, ed. and trans., Alexander Dovzhenko: The Poet as
Filmmaker (1973).
Last page !SE ZINNE
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Zinnemann, Fred
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(zin'-uh-muhn)
Best known for his Western High Noon (1952) and the Academy Award-winning From
Here to Eternity (1953), film director Fred Zinnemann, b. Vienna, Apr. 29, 1907,
built his post-World War II reputation on careful craftsmanship and the humanist
concerns exhibited in such "social-problem" films as The Search (1948), The Men
(1950), and Teresa (1951). He also proved himself a sensitive adapter of
literary texts in The Member of the Wedding (1952), and The Nun's Story (1959).
A Man for All Seasons (1966) earned him a second Oscar, and Julia (1977),
another Oscar nomination. The talent for thrillers Zinnemann displayed in Act of
Violence (1948) was, however, largely absent in The Day of the Jackal (1973).
WILLIAM S. PECHTER
Bibliography: Kozarski, R., Hollywood Directors, 1941-1976 (1977).
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