The Oxford History of World Cinema (76 page)

the shoddiest material. 'To see, in these early films, Garbo breathe life into an impossible

part', comment Durgnat and Kobal ( 1965), 'is like watching a swan skim the surface of a

pond of schmaltz.'

MGM, having seen the careers of European-accented stars like Negri ruined by sound,

nervously delayed Garbo's first talkie. Anna Christie ( 1930), a pedestrian version of

O'Neill, showed they had no cause for concern. Her voice was deep, vibrant, and

melancholy, her accent exotic but musical. With her status assured as Metro's top female

star, the legend began to grow: the asceticism, the shyness, the reclusiveness. 'I vahnt to

be alone', he image and the woman were hard to disentangle - which made her all the

more fascinating.Costume dramas figured largely in Garbo's 1930s films, not always to

advantage. 'A great actress', wrote Graham Greene, reviewing Conquest ( 1937), 'but what

dull pompous films they make for her.' Here as elsewhere the austerity of her acting was

smothered in period fustian and stilted dialogue, the direction entrusted to sound

journeymen like Brown (who also handled the remade Anna Karenina, 1935). Cukor's

Camille ( 1936) was an improvement, with Garbo heartbreaking in her doomed gaiety, but

in Mamoulian's Queen Christina ( 1933) she gave the performance of her career,

passionate and sexually ambiguous - and, in the final scene, hugging her grief to her like a

concealed dagger.The mystery of Garbo, the haunting aloofness and sense of inner pain,

had made her (and still make her) the object of cult adoration. MGM, as if puzzled what

to do with this enigma, decided she should be funny. ' Garbo laughs!' they announced for

Ninotchka ( 1939), apparently never having noticed the full-throated abandonment of her

laugh before. Acclaimed at the time, the film now looks contrived and, for Lubitsch,

surprisingly' heavy-handed. Two-Faced Woman ( 1941), an attempt at screwball comedy,

was a catastrophe. Garbo announced a temporary retirement from filmmaking - which

became permanent. From time to time, even as late as 1980, come-backs were mooted -

Dorian Gray for Albert Lewin, La Duchesse de Langeais for Ophuls but never

materialized. A legendary recluse, she retreated into inviolable privacy - confirmed in her

status as the greatest of movie starts, because the most unattainable. The woman and the

myth had become indissolubly merged. PHILIP KEMPSELECT FILMOGRAPHY Gösta

Berlings saga ('The Atonement of Gösta Berling) ( 1924); Die freudlose Gasse ( Joyless

Street) ( 1925); Flesh and the Devil ( 1926); Love ( Anna Karenina) ( 1927); A Woman of

Affairs ( 1928); The Kiss ( 1929); Anna Christie ( 1930); Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise

(The Rise of Helga) ( 1931); Mata Hari ( 1932); Grand Hotel ( 1932); As You Desire Me (

1932); Queen Christina ( 1933); The Painted Veil ( 1934); Anna Karenina ( 1935);

Camille ( 1936); Conquest ( Marie Walevska) ( 1937); Ninotchka ( 1939); TwoFaced

Woman ( 1941)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Durgnat, Raymond, and Kobal, John ( 1965), Greta Garbo.

Greene, Graham ( 1972), The Pleasure-Dome.

Haining, Peter ( 1990), The Legend of Garbo.

Walker, Alexander ( 1980), Greta Garbo: A Portrait.

The Heyday of the Silents

GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH

By the middle of the 1920s the cinema had reached a peak of splendour which in certain

respects it would never again surpass. It is true that there was not synchronized sound, nor

Technicolor, except at a very experimental stage. Synchronized sound was to be

introduced at the end of the decade, while Technicolor came into use only in the mid

1930s and beyond. Nor, except in isolated cases like Abel Gance's Napoléon ( 1927), was

there anything approaching the wide screen that audiences were to be accustomed to from

the 1950s onwards. It is also the case that viewing conditions in many parts of the world,

particularly in rural areas, remained makeshift and primitive.

But there were many compensations. Audiences in cities throughout the developed world

were treated to a spectacle which only twenty years earlier would have been

unimaginable. In the absence of on-screen sound there were orchestras and sound effects.

Film stocks using panchromatic emulsion on a nitrate base produced images of great

clarity and detail enhanced by tinting and toning. Flicker effect had been eliminated, and

screens up to 24 X 18 feet in size showed images brightly and without distortion, large

enough to give physical embodiment to the grand scale of the action.

Many of these qualities were to be lost with the coming of sound. Live music disappeared

from all but a handful of auditoriums. Tinting and toning effects were abandoned because

the colour on the film interfered with the sensors for reading the sound-track. The focus of

investment moved from visual effects to the problems of sound recording and, on the

exhibition side, to the installation of playback equipment. Sound also encouraged a loss of

scale, as emphasis shifted to the kind of scenes that could be shot with dialogue. The

spectacular qualities that had distinguished many silent films were reduced as the new

dialogue pictures took over, with musicals as the only significant exception.

The scale of the action projected into the large spaces which film-makers designed films

to be seen in was perhaps the most striking feature of the silent cinema in its heyday.

There was grandeur and a larger-than-life quality both in the panoramic long shots

incorporating landscapes, battles, or orgies, and in the close-ups magnifying details of an

object or a face. It was rare for a film to miss out on opportunities to aggrandize its

subject, whether this was the conquest of the West or life on a collective farm. The houses

of the rich tended to be mansions and those of the poor teeming tenements. Heroes and

heroines were beautiful, villains ugly, and dramatic values were projected on to the bodies

of the performers, enhanced by effects of shot scale and camera angle.

For this concatenation of effect to be achieved, many techniques had to be developed and

made concordant with each other. Film-makers proceeded blindly, with little to guide

them in the way of either precedent or theory. They did not exactly know what effects

they wanted, nor, to the extent that they knew, did they all want exactly the same effects.

As a result there were many experiments-in technology, in dramaturgy, in narrative, in set

design -- some of which proved to have no sequel. A number of distinct styles developed,

notably in Hollywood, but also in Germany, France, the Soviet Union, India, Japan, and

elsewhere. On the whole it was American -- ' Hollywood' -- styles which provided at least

a partial model for film-making throughout the world, but German models were also

influential, even in America, while the Russian 'montage' style was more admired than

imitated.

The style developed in America from about 1912 onwards and consolidated throughout

the silent period has sometimes been called 'classical', to distinguish it on the one hand

from the 'primitive' style which preceded it and on the other hand from other, less

consolidated styles which cropped up elsewhere and on the whole had less historical

success. Although it allowed for effects on a large scale, it was straightforward in the way

effects were marshalled. It was above all a narrative style, designed to let a story unfold in

front of the audience, and it organized its other effects under the banner of narrative

entertainment. Underlying this style, however, were other deepseated characteristics,

including a more generalized 'realistic-illusionist' aesthetic, developed in the industrial

context which increasingly determined the practice of film-making and viewing in the age

of the silent feature.

INDUSTRY

The key to the spectacular development of the silent cinema (and to its rapid transition to

sound at the end of the 1920s) lay in its industrial organization. This was not an incidental

characteristic-as maintained for example by writer, film-maker, and (twice) French

Minister of Culture André Malraux, who once airily described the cinema as being 'par

ailleurs' ('furthermore') an industry. Rather, the potential for industrial development was

built into the cinema from the very beginning, both through its intrinsic dependence on

technology (camera, film stock, projector) and through its emergence in the early period

as, literally, 'show business'. The early cinema should not really be dignified with the

name of industry. It was a ramshackle business, conducted on a small scale, using

equipment and technology which (with the exception of the film stock itself) could be put

together in an artisanal workshop. But as films became more elaborate, and the level of

investment necessary to make them and ensure their distribution increased, so the cinema

came to acquire a genuinely industrial character-in the scale of its operations, in its forms

of organization, and in its dependence on capital.

The definitive industrialization of cinema was not achieved until the coming of sound at

the end of the 1920s, which consummated its integration into the world of finance capital

and its links (via the electric companies) to music recording and radio. But already in the

years after the end of the First World War the cinema had acquired its character as a

prototype of what has since come to be called a culture industry. Like radio and music

recording it was technological by definition, but unlike them it was not just a technology

used to transmit a preexisting content. The content itself was created by means of the

technology. Having been technologically created, films then also had to be distributed to

places where a related technology could be used for showing them. The quantity of

investment, the time scale over which it was deployed, and the need to match supply and

demand imposed on the cinema not only industrial organization at the point of production,

but related business practice at every level. Films were produced for the market, and

operations designed to manage market demands had a great influence on film production.

This was to have unprecedented consequences for every aspect of the medium.

THE STUDIO

Films were produced in studios. Although the American film companies had moved to

southern California in the 1910s partly for the sake of the abundant sunlight and the

variety of locations, by the 1920s a majority of scenes had come to be shot in artificial

settings, either indoors under electric light or outdoors on constructed sets. Film-makers

ventured on to locations only for scenes (or single shots) which could not be simulated in

the studio. Studio shooting not only gave more control of filming conditions, it was also

more economical. The twin needs of economy and control also gave rise to simplified

methods of constructing sets and ever more sophisticated ways of putting shots and

scenes together with the aid of special effects of one kind or another.

Although in common parlance the term special effects is generally reserved for techniques

which simulate fantastic events, many of the same techniques were in practice more often

used for the portrayal of realistic scenesas an easier and cheaper way of shooting them

than if the scene had to be reproduced in actual real settings. The enormous expense of

constructing the actual-size sets for the Babylonian sequence of Griffith's Intolerance

( 1916) spurred film companies to research simpler ways of making it appear as if the

action was taking place in actual three-dimensional space. Within a scene studio shots (for

example close-ups) would be matched to location shots, while a single shot could be

composed of heterogeneous elements carefully merged to look as if it represented a single

reality. A simple device was to paint part of a scene on a glass plate, with the action being

shot through the clear portion of the glass. But there were also more complicated

techniques, such as the one devised by the German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan in

the mid-1920s and used, among other films, on Fritz Lang's Metropolis ( 1927). This

involved constructing miniature sets which were located to the side of the action to be

filmed. A partially scraped mirror was then placed in front of the camera, at an angle of

forty-five degrees. The action was shot through the scraped part of the mirror, while the

sets were reflected through the unscraped part. Alternatively part of the scene could be

obscured by a matte, and inserted into the shot later in the laboratory. Or a background

(shot on location by a second film unit) could be projected on a screen at the back of the

studio, while the characters performed in front of it, though this did not come into

widespread use until the early sound period, when dialogues needed to be recorded in

studio conditions.

The effect of these developments in studio production techniques was to push the cinema

of the late silent period more and more in the direction of realistic illusion, blurring the

boundaries between the obviously illusionistic (the films of Georges Méliès for example),

the theatrical, and the unquestionably real. Fiction films aspired to a reality effect whether

their content was realistic events or fantastic and implausible ones. Only at the margins