The Oxford History of World Cinema (77 page)

were films made which either played on effects for their own sake (or for the audience to

wonder at) or which depended on unmediated authenticity in portraying real events.

Occasionally, as in comedy, these two extremes would be joined and the audience would

be left marvelling both at the fantastic things that were happening (or appeared to be

happening) and at the real physical achievement of the gag taking place in real time in a

real place. More often, however, the resources at the disposal of the studio were deployed

for purposes of a generic verisimilitude; the action had a sufficient 'ring of truth' for the

means of its enactment to pass largely unnoticed.

The idea that cinema could use artifice of many kinds to create a self-sufficient cinematic

reality emerged slowly, and continued to be felt as something of a paradox. The first

person really to get to grips with this paradox was probably the Soviet film-maker and

theoretician Lev Kuleshov, whose famous 'experiments' in the early 1920s were devoted

to showing how the narrative content of single shots was determined by their

juxtaposition rather than by their intrinsic 'real-life' properties. But Kuleshov's

experiments focused almost entirely on montage (the editing together of shots) rather than

on the potential for artifice present in the making of the shot itself, and it was in Germany

and in Hollywood, where the techniques of studio production were most highly

developed, that realist illusionism (more realist in the Hollywood case, more illusionist in

the German) really came into its own as the dominant aesthetic of the silent film.

MELODRAMA, COMEDY, MODERNISM

During the silent period most of the genres emerged that were to characterize the cinema

throughout the studio period -- crime films, Westerns, fantasies, etc. Of the classic genres

only the musical, for obvious reasons, was absent, though many films were made for non-

synchronized musical accompaniment. Overarching the generic categories into which

films were grouped for marketing purposes, however, the films of the silent period (and to

a great extent thereafter) can be categorized under two main 'modes', the comic and the

melodramatic.

The term melodrama is used by film scholars to designate two types of film in particular-

those (particularly in the very early period) which show a clear historical descent from

nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, and the sagas of love and family life (often

overlapping with so-called 'women's pictures') that had such a powerful presence in

Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. These uses are not strictly compatible, since

the two types of film have few particular features in common. Early film melodrama was

highly gestural and involved the accent uating of moral and dramatic values around

characteristic motifs -- heroes spurred to action by revelations of unspeakable villainy,

leading to last-minute rescues of innocent heroines, deus ex machina endings, and the

like. These features are all somewhat attenuated in the socalled melodramas of the later

period, and are instead to be found more often in action films (such as Westerns) than in

the increasingly psychological dramas of the 1930s and after. Links between the two are

to be found in the work of D. W. Griffith, who formalized the means for inserting

melodramatic values into the flow of cinematic narrative and (by his use of the close-up

as both a narrative and an emotive device) gave the conventional melodrama a measure of

psychological depth; and in that of Frank Borzage , who, in Humoresque ( 1920), 7th

Heaven ( 1927), and other films, turned stock figures of melodrama into characters driven

by preternatural inner strength.

The MGM costume department in 1928

More generally, the American cinema in the 1920s had great difficulty in liberating itself

from the narrative schemas of theatrical melodrama and its Griffithian continuation in the

cinema. With the steady increase in the length of films from about 1913 onwards -- from

three or four reels to six or even more in the post-war period -- filmmakers were able to

turn to stories of broader scope and greater complexity, often in the form of adaptations of

novels. Despite the refinement of narrative technique, however, it was rare for this

opportunity to be translated in the direction of realistic and nuanced character

development. Rather (and this is as true if not truer of the bulk of European production as

it was of American) narratives became clotted with incident, while the characters to

whom the incidents happened continued to be drawn in schematic terms. In Rex Ingram's

acclaimed Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ( 1921), for example, the main characters

and the values they represent are proclaimed in the intertitles early in the film and typified

in appearance and gesture throughout the action, which is spread over several decades.

Although the moral values of Griffith's melodramas, and their embodiment in scowling

villains, luckless heroes, and perennially threatened