3778 lines
220 KiB
Plaintext
3778 lines
220 KiB
Plaintext
ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ ÜÜÜ ÜÜÜÜ
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ÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛßÛßßßßßÛÛÜ ÜÜßßßßÜÜÜÜ ÜÛÜ ÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÜÜÜÜÜÛßß ßÛÛ
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Mo.iMP ÜÛÛÜ ßÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÝÛ ÞÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÞÛÛÛÛ ÞÛÛÛÛÛÝ ßÛß
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ÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÝ ÞÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÝ ÛÛÛ ÛÛÛÛÛÛ
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ÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÝ ÞÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÞÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ß ÞÛÛÛÛÛÛÜ ÜÛ
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ÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÝ ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÝ ÞÞÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛß
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ÜÛßÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÜÜ ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÝ ÛÛÞÛÛÛÛÛÝ ÞÛÛÛÛÛÛßß
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ÜÛßÛÛÛÛÛÛÜÛÛÛÛÜÞÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÞÛ ßÛÛÛÛÛ Ü ÛÝÛÛÛÛÛ Ü
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ÜÛ ÞÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛß ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ßÛÜ ßÛÛÛÜÜ ÜÜÛÛÛß ÞÛ ÞÛÛÛÝ ÜÜÛÛ
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ÛÛ ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛß ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÜ ßÛÜ ßßÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛß ÜÜÜß ÛÛÛÛÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÛÛÛÛÛß
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ßÛÜ ÜÛÛÛß ßÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÜ ßßÜÜ ßßÜÛÛßß ßÛÛÜ ßßßÛßÛÛÛÛÛÛÛßß
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ßßßßß ßßÛÛß ßßßßß ßßßßßßßßßßßßß
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ARRoGANT CoURiERS WiTH ESSaYS
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Grade Level: Type of Work Subject/Topic is on:
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[ ]6-8 [ ]Class Notes [Everything you ever ]
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[ ]9-10 [ ]Cliff Notes [wanted to know about ]
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[ ]11-12 [ ]Essay/Report [how movies work. ]
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[x]College [x]Misc [ ]
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Dizzed:7/94 # of Words:33817 School: ? State: ?
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ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ>ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ>ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ>Chop Here>ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ>ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ>ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ>ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
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cinematography
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--------------------------------
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(sin-uh-muh-tahg'-ruh-fee)
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Cinematography is the technique and art of making motion pictures, which
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are a sequence of photographs of a single subject that are taken over time
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and then projected in the same sequence to create an illusion of motion.
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Each image of a moving object is slightly different from the preceding one.
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Projector
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A motion-picture projector projects the sequence of picture frames,
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contained on a ribbon of film, in their proper order. A claw engages
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perforations in the film and pulls the film down into the film gate,
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placing each new frame in exactly the same position as the preceding one.
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When the frame is in position, it is projected onto the screen by
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illuminating it with a beam of light. The period of time between the
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projection of each still image when no image is projected is normally not
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noticed by the viewer.
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Two perceptual phenomena--persistence of vision and the critical flicker
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frequency--cause a continuous image. Persistence of a vision is the
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ability of the viewer to retain or in some way remember the impression of
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an image after it has been withdrawn from view. The critical flicker
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frequency is the minimum rate of interruption of the projected light beam
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that will not cause the motion picture to appear to flicker. A frequency
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above about 48 interruptions a second will eliminate flicker.
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Camera
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Like a still camera (see CAMERA), a movie camera shoots each picture
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individually. The movie camera, however, must also move the film precisely
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and control the shutter, keeping the amount of light reaching the film
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nearly constant from frame to frame. The shutter of a movie camera is
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essentially a circular plate rotated by an electric motor. An opening in
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the plate exposes the film frame only after the film has been positioned
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and has come to rest. The plate itself continues to rotate smoothly.
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Photographic materials must be manufactured with great precision. The
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perforations, or holes in the film, must be precisely positioned. The
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pitch--the distance from one hole to another--must be maintained by correct
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film storage. By the late 1920s, a sound-on-film system of synchronous
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SOUND RECORDING was developed and gained widespread popularity. In this
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process, the sound is recorded separately on a machine synchronized with
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the picture camera. Unlike the picture portion of the film, the sound
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portion is recorded and played back continuously rather than in
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intermittent motion. Although editing still makes use of perforated film
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for flexibility, a more modern technique uses conventional magnetic tape
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for original recording and synchronizes the recording to the picture
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electronically (see TAPE RECORDER).
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If the number of photographs projected per unit time (frame rate) differs
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from the number produced per unit time by the camera, an apparent speeding
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up or slowing down of the normal rate is created. Changes in the frame
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rates are used occasionally for comic effect or motion analysis.
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Cinematography becomes an art when the filmmaker attempts to make moving
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images that relate directly to human perception, provide visual
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significance and information, and provoke emotional response.
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History of Film Technology
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Several parlor toys of the early 1800s used visual illusions similar to
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those of the motion picture. These include the thaumatrope (1825); the
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phenakistiscope (1832); the stroboscope (1832); and the zoetrope (1834).
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The photographic movie, however, was first used as a means of investigation
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rather than of theatrical illusion. Leland Stanford, then governor of
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California, hired photographer Eadweard MUYBRIDGE to prove that at some
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time in a horse's gallop all four legs are simultaneously off the ground.
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Muybridge did so by using several cameras to produce a series of
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photographs with very short time intervals between them. Such a multiple
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photographic record was used in the kinetoscope, which displayed a
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photographic moving image and was commercially successful for a time.
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The kinetoscope was invented either by Thomas Alva EDISON or by his
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assistant William K. L. Dickson, both of whom had experimented originally
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with moving pictures as a supplement to the phonograph record. They later
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turned to George EASTMAN, who provided a flexible celluloid film base to
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store the large number of images necessary to create motion pictures.
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The mechanical means of cinematography were gradually perfected. It was
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discovered that it was better to display the sequence of images
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intermittently rather than continuously. This technique allowed a greater
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presentation time and more light for the projection of each frame. Another
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improvement was the loop above and below the film gate in both the camera
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and the projector, which prevented the film from tearing.
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By the late 1920s, synchronized sound was being introduced in movies.
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These sound films soon replaced silent films in popularity. To prevent the
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microphones from picking up camera noise, a portable housing was designed
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that muffled noises and allowed the camera to be moved about. In recent
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years, equipment, lighting, and film have all been improved, but the
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processes involved remain essentially the same. RICHARD FLOBERG
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Bibliography
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Bibliography: Fielding, Raymond, ed., A Technological History of Motion
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Pictures and Television (1967); Happe, I. Bernard, Basic Motion Picture
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Technology, 2d ed. (1975); Malkiewicz, J. Kris, and Rogers, Robert E.,
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Cinematography (1973); Wheeler, Leslie J., Principles of Cinematography,
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4th ed. (1973).
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film:
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--------------------------------
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film, history of
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--------------------------------
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The history of film has been dominated by the discovery and testing of the
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paradoxes inherent in the medium itself. Film uses machines to record
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images of life; it combines still photographs to give the illusion of
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continuous motion; it seems to present life itself, but it also offers
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impossible unrealities approached only in dreams.^The motion picture was
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developed in the 1890s from the union of still PHOTOGRAPHY, which records
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physical reality, with the persistence-of-vision toy, which made drawn
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figures appear to move. Four major film traditions have developed since
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then: fictional narrative film, which tells stories about people with whom
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an audience can identify because their world looks familiar; nonfictional
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documentary film, which focuses on the real world either to instruct or to
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reveal some sort of truth about it; animated film, which makes drawn or
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sculpted figures look as if they are moving and speaking; and experimental
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film, which exploits film's ability to create a purely abstract,
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nonrealistic world unlike any previously seen.^Film is considered the
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youngest art form and has inherited much from the older and more
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traditional arts. Like the novel, it can tell stories; like the drama, it
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can portray conflict between live characters; like painting, it composes in
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space with light, color, shade, shape, and texture; like music, it moves in
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time according to principles of rhythm and tone; like dance, it presents
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the movement of figures in space and is often underscored by music; and
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like photography, it presents a two-dimensional rendering of what appears
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to be three-dimensional reality, using perspective, depth, and
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shading.^Film, however, is one of the few arts that is both spatial and
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temporal, intentionally manipulating both space and time. This synthesis
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has given rise to two conflicting theories about film and its historical
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development. Some theorists, such as S. M. EISENSTEIN and Rudolf
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Arnheim, have argued that film must take the path of the other modern arts
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and concentrate not on telling stories or representing reality but on
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investigating time and space in a pure and consciously abstract way.
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Others, such as Andre Bazin and Siegfried KRACAUER, maintain that film must
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fully and carefully develop its connection with nature so that it can
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portray human events as excitingly and revealingly as possible.^Because of
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his fame, his success at publicizing his activities, and his habit of
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patenting machines before actually inventing them, Thomas EDISON received
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most of the credit for having invented the motion picture; as early as
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1887, he patented a motion picture camera, but this could not produce
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images. In reality, many inventors contributed to the development of
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moving pictures. Perhaps the first important contribution was the series
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of motion photographs made by Eadweard MUYBRIDGE between 1872 and 1877.
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Hired by the governor of California, Leland Stanford, to capture on film
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the movement of a racehorse, Muybridge tied a series of wires across the
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track and connected each one to the shutter of a still camera. The running
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horse tripped the wires and exposed a series of still photographs, which
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Muybridge then mounted on a stroboscopic disk and projected with a magic
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lantern to reproduce an image of the horse in motion. Muybridge shot
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hundreds of such studies and went on to lecture in Europe, where his work
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intrigued the French scientist E. J. MAREY. Marey devised a means of
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shooting motion photographs with what he called a photographic gun.^Edison
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became interested in the possibilities of motion photography after hearing
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Muybridge lecture in West Orange, N.J. Edison's motion picture
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experiments, under the direction of William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, began
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in 1888 with an attempt to record the photographs on wax cylinders similar
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to those used to make the original phonograph recordings. Dickson made a
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major breakthrough when he decided to use George EASTMAN's celluloid film
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instead. Celluloid was tough but supple and could be manufactured in long
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rolls, making it an excellent medium for motion photography, which required
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great lengths of film. Between 1891 and 1895, Dickson shot many 15-second
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films using the Edison camera, or Kinetograph, but Edison decided against
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projecting the films for audiences--in part because the visual results were
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inadequate and in part because he felt that motion pictures would have
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little public appeal. Instead, Edison marketed an electrically driven
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peep-hole viewing machine (the Kinetoscope) that displayed the marvels
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recorded to one viewer at a time.^Edison thought so little of the
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Kinetoscope that he failed to extend his patent rights to England and
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Europe, an oversight that allowed two Frenchmen, Louis and Auguste LUMIERE,
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to manufacture a more portable camera and a functional projector, the
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Cinematographe, based on Edison's machine. The movie era might be said to
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have begun officially on Dec. 28, 1895, when the Lumieres presented a
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program of brief motion pictures to a paying audience in the basement of a
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Paris cafe. English and German inventors also copied and improved upon the
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Edison machines, as did many other experimenters in the United States. By
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the end of the 19th century vast numbers of people in both Europe and
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America had been exposed to some form of motion pictures.^The earliest
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films presented 15- to 60-second glimpses of real scenes recorded outdoors
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(workmen, trains, fire engines, boats, parades, soldiers) or of staged
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theatrical performances shot indoors. These two early tendencies--to
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record life as it is and to dramatize life for artistic effect--can be
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viewed as the two dominant paths of film history.^Georges MELIES was the
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most important of the early theatrical filmmakers. A magician by trade,
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Melies, in such films as A Trip to the Moon (1902), showed how the cinema
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could perform the most amazing magic tricks of all: simply by stopping the
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camera, adding something to the scene or removing something from it, and
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then starting the camera again, he made things seem to appear and
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disappear. Early English and French filmmakers such as Cecil Hepworth,
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James Williamson, and Ferdinand Zecca also discovered how rhythmic movement
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(the chase) and rhythmic editing could make cinema's treatment of time and
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space more exciting.
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American Film in the Silent Era (1903-1928)
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A most interesting primitive American film was The Great Train Robbery
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(1903), directed by Edwin S. PORTER of the Edison Company. This early
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western used much freer editing and camera work than usual to tell its
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story, which included bandits, a holdup, a chase by a posse, and a final
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shoot-out. When other companies (Vitagraph, the American Mutoscope and
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Biograph Company, Lubin, and Kalem among them) began producing films that
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rivaled those of the Edison Company, Edison sued them for infringement of
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his patent rights. This so-called patents war lasted 10 years (1898-1908),
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ending only when nine leading film companies merged to form the Motion
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Picture Patents Company.^One reason for the settlement was the enormous
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profits to be derived from what had begun merely as a cheap novelty.
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Before 1905 motion pictures were usually shown in vaudeville houses as one
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act on the bill. After 1905 a growing number of small, storefront theaters
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called nickelodeons, accommodating less than 200 patrons, began to show
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motion pictures exclusively. By 1908 an estimated 10 million Americans
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were paying their nickels and dimes to see such films. Young speculators
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such as William Fox and Marcus Loew saw their theaters, which initially
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cost but $1,600 each, grow into enterprises worth $150,000 each within 5
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years. Called the drama of the people, the early motion pictures attracted
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primarily working-class and immigrant audiences who found the nickelodeon a
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pleasant family diversion; they might not have been able to read the words
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in novels and newspapers, but they understood the silent language of
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pictures.^The popularity of the moving pictures led to the first attacks
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against it by crusading moralists, police, and politicians. Local
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censorship boards were established to eliminate objectionable material from
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films. In 1909 the infant U.S. film industry waged a counterattack by
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creating the first of many self-censorship boards, the National Board of
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Censorship (after 1916 called the National Board of Review), whose purpose
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was to set moral standards for films and thereby save them from costly
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mutilation.^A nickelodeon program consisted of about six 10-minute films,
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usually including an adventure, a comedy, an informational film, a chase
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film, and a melodrama. The most accomplished maker of these films was
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Biograph's D. W. GRIFFITH, who almost singlehandedly transformed both the
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art and the business of the motion picture. Griffith made over 400 short
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films between 1908 and 1913, in this period discovering or developing
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almost every major technique by which film manipulates time and space: the
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use of alternating close-ups, medium shots, and distant panoramas; the
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subtle control of rhythmic editing; the effective use of traveling shots,
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atmospheric lighting, narrative commentary, poetic detail, and visual
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symbolism; and the advantages of understated acting, at which his acting
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company excelled. The culmination of Griffith's work was The Birth of a
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Nation (1915), a mammoth, 3-hour epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
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Its historical detail, suspense, and passionate conviction were to outdate
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the 10-minute film altogether.^The decade between 1908 and 1918 was one of
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the most important in the history of American film. The full-length
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feature film replaced the program of short films; World War I destroyed or
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restricted the film industries of Europe, promoting greater technical
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innovation, growth, and commercial stability in America; the FILM INDUSTRY
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was consolidated with the founding of the first major studios in Hollywood,
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Calif. (Fox, Paramount, and Universal); and the great American silent
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comedies were born. Mack SENNETT became the driving force behind the
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Keystone Company soon after joining it in 1912; Hal Roach founded his
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comedy company in 1914; and Charlie CHAPLIN probably had the best-known
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face in the world in 1916.^During this period the first movie stars rose to
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fame, replacing the anonymous players of the short films. In 1918,
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America's two favorite stars, Charlie Chaplin and Mary PICKFORD, both
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signed contracts for over $1 million. Other familiar stars of the decade
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included comedians Fatty ARBUCKLE and John Bunny, cowboys William S. HART
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and Bronco Billy Anderson, matinee idols Rudolph VALENTINO and John
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Gilbert, and the alluring females Theda BARA and Clara BOW. Along with the
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stars came the first movie fan magazines; Photoplay published its inaugural
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issue in 1912. That same year also saw the first of the FILM SERIALS, The
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Perils of Pauline, starring Pearl White.^The next decade in American film
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history, 1918 to 1928, was a period of stabilization rather than expansion.
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Films were made within studio complexes, which were, in essence, factories
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designed to produce films in the same way that Henry Ford's factories
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produced automobiles. Film companies became monopolies in that they not
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only made films but distributed them to theaters and owned the theaters in
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which they were shown as well. This vertical integration formed the
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commercial foundation of the film industry for the next 30 years. Two new
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producing companies founded during the decade were Warner Brothers (1923),
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which would become powerful with its early conversion to synchronized
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sound, and Metro-Goldwyn (1924; later Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), the producing
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arm of Loew's, under the direction of Louis B. MAYER and Irving
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THALBERG.^Attacks against immorality in films intensified during this
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decade, spurred by the sensual implications and sexual practices of the
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movie stars both on and off the screen. In 1921, after several nationally
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publicized sex and drug scandals, the industry headed off the threat of
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federal CENSORSHIP by creating the office of the Motion Picture Producers
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and Distributors of America (now the Motion Picture Association of
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America), under the direction of Will HAYS. Hays, who had been postmaster
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general of the United States and Warren G. Harding's campaign manager,
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began a series of public relations campaigns to underscore the importance
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of motion pictures to American life. He also circulated several lists of
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practices that were henceforth forbidden on and off the screen.^Hollywood
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films of the 1920s became more polished, subtle, and skillful, and
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especially imaginative in handling the absence of sound. It was the great
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age of comedy. Chaplin retained a hold on his world-following with
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full-length features such as The Kid (1920) and The Gold Rush (1925);
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Harold LLOYD climbed his way to success--and got the girl--no matter how
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great the obstacles as Grandma's Boy (1922) or The Freshman (1925); Buster
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KEATON remained deadpan through a succession of wildly bizarre sight gags
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in Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator (both 1924); Harry Langdon was ever the
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innocent elf cast adrift in a mean, tough world; and director Ernst
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LUBITSCH, fresh from Germany, brought his "touch" to understated comedies
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of manners, sex, and marriage. The decade saw the United States's first
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great war film (The Big Parade, 1925), its first great westerns (The
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Covered Wagon, 1923; The Iron Horse, 1924), and its first great biblical
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epics (The Ten Commandments, 1923, and King of Kings, 1927, both made by
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Cecil B. DE MILLE). Other films of this era included Erich Von STROHEIM's
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sexual studies, Lon CHANEY's grotesque costume melodramas, and the first
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great documentary feature, Robert J. FLAHERTY's Nanook of the North
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(1922).
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European Film in the 1920s
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In the same decade, the European film industries recovered from the war to
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produce one of the richest artistic periods in film history. The German
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cinema, stimulated by EXPRESSIONISM in painting and the theater and by the
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design theories of the BAUHAUS, created bizarrely expressionistic settings
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for such fantasies as Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919),
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F. W. MURNAU's Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz LANG's Metropolis (1927). The
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Germans also brought their sense of decor, atmospheric lighting, and
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penchant for a frequently moving camera to such realistic political and
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psychological studies as Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924), G. W. PABST's
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The Joyless Street (1925), and E. A. Dupont's Variety (1925).^Innovation
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also came from the completely different approach taken by filmmakers in the
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USSR, where movies were intended not only to entertain but also to instruct
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the masses in the social and political goals of their new government. The
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Soviet cinema used MONTAGE, or complicated editing techniques that relied
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on visual metaphor, to create excitement and richness of texture and,
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ultimately, to affect ideological attitudes. The most influential Soviet
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theorist and filmmaker was Sergei M. Eisenstein, whose Potemkin (1925) had
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a worldwide impact; other innovative Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s
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included V. I. PUDOVKIN, Lev Kuleshov, Abram Room, and Alexander
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|
DOVZHENKO.^The Swedish cinema of the 1920s relied heavily on the striking
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visual qualities of the northern landscape. Mauritz Stiller and Victor
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Sjostrom mixed this natural imagery of mountains, sea, and ice with
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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
|
|
|
|
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).
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bibliography: Quigley, Martin, Jr., Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin
|
|
of Motion Pictures (1969).
|
|
|
|
|
|
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).
|
|
|
|
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 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
|
|
|
|
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).
|
|
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
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).
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pudovkin, Vsevolod I.
|
|
--------------------------------
|
|
(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).
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dovzhenko, Alexander
|
|
--------------------------------
|
|
(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).
|
|
|
|
|
|
Zinnemann, Fred
|
|
--------------------------------
|
|
(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).
|