Classical Hollywood cinema

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, adjusted with inflation is the highest-grossing film of all time

Classical Hollywood cinema, classical Hollywood narrative, and classical continuity are terms used in film history which designate both a narrative and visual style of film-making characteristic of American cinema between 1917 and 1960. The "Classical Hollywood" era was a period of renaissance in American film. Stylistically, it was characterized by a distinctive approach to narrative and visual storytelling. The narrative style of classical Hollywood treated film narration as literary narration, with a plot centered around the psychological motivation of the characters and their struggle towards a goal. Likewise, the visual approach towards storytelling treated film much like a photographed play, manipulating time (through continuity editing) and space (through lighting, blocking, composition, and depth) to make the film appear as real as a production on the stage. The narrative style of Classical Hollywood cinema is called the "classical Hollywood narrative". Likewise, for its characteristic treatment of time as linear and spatial orientation as continuous, the visual style of classical Hollywood cinema is often called "classical continuity". Though the narrative style associated with Classical Hollywood cinema has been adhered to quite liberally since 1960, the basic premises set by classical continuity remain the primary form of visual storytelling to this day.

History of Narrative Film-making

Early Narrative Film (1895-1913)

For centuries the only visual standard of narrative storytelling was the theatre. Since the first narrative film, Lumière's L'Arroseur arrosé, was made in 1895, filmmakers sought to capture the power and realism of live theatre on the cinema screen. Most of these filmmakers started as directors on the late 19th century stage, and likewise most film actors had roots in vaudeville or melodrama. Early film-makers largely failed to recognize both the limitations and the freedom of the new medium. Visually, early narrative films had adapted little from the stage, and their narratives had adapted very little from vaudeville and melodrama. Regardless of any merit they had in the proscenium, these narrative films lost both their power and their realism on the cinematic frame. Melodrama and vaudeville only emphasized the artificiality of film, and likewise stagy visuals on film appeared two-dimensional and static. Before the visual style which would become known as "classical continuity", scenes were filmed in full shot and used carefully choreographed staging to portray plot and character relationships. Cutting was extremely limited, and mostly consisted of close-ups of writing on objects for their legibility.

Maturation of the Silents (1913-1917)

Theatrical release poster for The Birth of a Nation

Though lacking the inherent realism of the stage, film (unlike stage) offers the freedom to greatly manipulate composition, depth, and blocking, and thus to create the illusion of realism. By By the early 1910s, film-making was beginning to adapt to its artistic potential. In Europe it was known as the beginning of a Golden Age of film, in America this artistic change was caused by filmmakers like Griffith finally breaking the grip of the Edison Trust to make films independent of the manufacturing monopoly. Films worldwide began to noticeably adopt visual and narrative elements which would be found in Classic Hollywood cinema. 1913 was a particularly fruitful year for the medium, as pioneering directors from several countries produced masterpieces such as The Mothering Heart (D. W. Griffith), Ingeborg Holm (Victor Sjöström), and L’enfant de Paris (Léonce Perret) that set new standards for film as a form of storytelling — and all used continuity editing.

In the world generally and America specifically, the influence of Griffith on film-making was unmatched. Equally influential were his actors in adapting their performances to film-making. Lillian Gish, the star of The Mothering Heart, is particularly noted for her influence on screen performance techniques. D. W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation was groundbreaking for film as a means of storytelling, featuring a narrative numerous obscure and novel visual techniques as the use of panoramic long shots, the iris effect, still-shots, night photography, panning camera shots, crowd shots, color tinting for dramatic purposes, and like all of Griffith's films since the early 1910s, continuity editing. The film initiated so many advances in American cinema that it was rendered obsolete within a few years. Though 1913 was a global landmark for film-making, 1917 was primarily an American one.

Classical Hollywood Cinema

In the Silent Era (1917-late 1920s)

Lillian Gish, the "First Lady of the American Cinema", was a leading star in the silent era

The era of "Classical Hollywood Cinema" is distinguished by a narrative and visual style which would begin to dominate the medium by 1917.

Major Classic Filmography

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917 film), The Poor Little Rich Girl, Wild and Wooly, Broken Blossoms, The Last of the Mohicans, Within Our Gates, Pollyanna, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Safety Last!, Greed, Sherlock, Jr., The Thief of Bagdad, Ben-Hur, The Big Parade, The Gold Rush, The Black Pirate, The General, Flesh and the Devil, The Wind, and It

In the Sound Era: The Golden Age

During the golden age of Hollywood, which lasted from the end of the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s to the early 1960s, films were prolifically issued by the Hollywood studios. The narrative and visual styles are essentially identical in the talkies as in the silents. The primary changes in American film-making came from the film industry itself. The classical Hollywood mode of production, with its reigning star system bankrolled by several key studios, had preceded sound by several years. By mid-1920 most of the prominent American directors and actors, who had worked independently since the early 10s, would became a part of the new studio system to continue to their work.

The era after the adoption of sound until 1960 is often characterized as a "golden age" of Hollywood film. This era was characterized by the narrative and visual styles which became the norm in 1917, and by the mode of production which had became the norm in mid-1920. Thus, the "Golden Age" is a purely technical (rather than an artistic) distinction. The beginning of the sound era itself is ambiguously defined. Some begin the start of the sound era with The Jazz Singer was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films. Others begin the era at 1929, when the silent age had definitively ended. Most Hollywood pictures from the late 1920s to 1960 adhered closely to a genre—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films, Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. DeMille's films were almost all made at Paramount, director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth-Century Fox.

After The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, Warner Brothers gained huge success and was able to acquire its own string of movie theatres, beginning with Stanley Theatres and First National Productions in 1928; MGM had also owned a string of theatres since forming in 1924, known as Loews Theatres, and the Fox film Corporation owned the Fox Theatre strings as well. RKO, another company that owned theatres, had formed in 1928 from a merger between Keith-Orpheum Theaters and the Radio Corporation of America.

RKO, formed in response to the monopoly Western Electric's ERPI had over sound in films, began to use sound in films through its own method, known as Photophone. Paramount, which had already acquired Balaban and Katz in 1926, would answer to the success of Warner Bros. and RKO, and buy a number of theaters in the late 1920s as well, before making their final purchase in 1929, through acquiring all the individual theaters belonging to the Cooperative Box Office, located in Detroit, and dominate the Detroit theaters.

However, filmmaking was still a business and motion picture companies made money by operating under the studio system. The major studios kept thousands of people on salary—actors, producers, directors, writers, stunt men, craftspersons and technicians. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across America, theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material. In 1930, MPDDA President Will Hays also founded the Hays (Production) Code, which followed censorship guidelines and went into effect after government threats of censorship expanded by 1930. However the code was not enforced until 1934.

Throughout the early 1930s, risqué films and salacious advertising became widespread in the period known as Pre-Code Hollywood. MGM dominated the industry and had most of the top stars in Hollywood. Another great achievement of American cinema during this era came through Walt Disney's animation. In 1937, Disney created the most successful film of its time, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs In the mid-to-late 1930s box office profits contracted considerably. Many blamed the star system, as stars were paid huge salaries due to their contracts despite failure at the box office. Leading stars of the era such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were labeled "Box office Poison". Film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented film-making. One reason this was possible is that, with so many films being made, not every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles and regarded by some as the greatest film of all time, fits that description. In other cases, strong-willed directors like Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra battled the studios in order to achieve their artistic visions. The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939, which saw the release of such classics as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Destry Rides Again,Young Mr. Lincoln, Wuthering Heights, Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka, Beau Geste, Babes in Arms, Gunga Din, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and The Roaring Twenties.

Major classic filmography

Among other films from the golden age period now considered classics, are: Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood, It's a Wonderful Life, It Happened One Night, King Kong, Citizen Kane, Swing Time, Some Like It Hot, A Night at the Opera, Sergeant York, All About Eve, The Maltese Falcon, The Searchers, Laura, North by Northwest, Morocco, Rebel Without a Cause, Rear Window, Double Indemnity, City Lights, Psycho, High Noon, Bringing Up Baby, Notorious, Singin' in the Rain, Ben-Hur, Roman Holiday, From Here To Eternity, and On the Waterfront.

Style

The style of classical Hollywood cinema, as elaborated by David Bordwell, was heavily influenced by the ideas of the Renaissance and its resurgence of mankind as the focal point.

Narrative Style

Classical narration progresses always through psychological motivation, i.e. by the will of a human character and its struggle with obstacles towards a defined goal. The aspects of space and time are subordinated to the narrative element which is usually composed of two lines of action: A primary narrative (often a romance) intertwined with a secondary narrative, such as a business or a crime. This narrative is structured with an unmistakable beginning, middle and end, and generally there is a distinct resolution. Utilizing actors, events, causal effects, main points and secondary points are basic characteristics of this type of narrative. The characters in Classical Hollywood Cinema have clearly definable traits, are active, and very goal oriented. They are causal agents motivated by psychological rather than social concerns.

Visual Style

Time in classical Hollywood is continuous, since non-linearity calls attention to the illusory workings of the medium. The only permissible manipulation of time in this format is the flashback. It is mostly used to introduce a memory sequence of a character, e.g. Casablanca.

Likewise, the treatment of space in classic Hollywood strives to overcome or conceal the two-dimensionality of film ("invisible style") and is strongly centered upon the human body. The majority of shots in a classical film focus on gestures or facial expressions (medium-long and medium shots). André Bazin once compared classical film to a photographed play in that the events seem to exist objectively and that cameras only give us the best view of the whole play.

This treatment of space consists of four main aspects: centering, balancing, frontality and depth. Persons or objects of significance are mostly in the center part of the picture frame and never out of focus. Balancing refers to the visual composition, i.e. characters are evenly distributed throughout the frame. The action is subtly addressed towards the spectator (frontality) and set, lighting (mostly three-point lighting) and costumes are designed to separate foreground from the background (depth).

Production

The mode of production which had characterized the of the classical era since the mid-1920s came to be known as the Hollywood studio system and the star system, which standardized the way movies were produced. All film workers (actors, directors, etc.) were employees of a particular film studio. This resulted in a certain uniformity to film style: directors were encouraged to think of themselves as employees rather than artists, and hence auteurs did not flourish (although some directors, such as William Wyler, Henry Hathaway, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Billy Wilder, and Howard Hawks, worked within this system and still fulfilled their artistic selves).

The Hollywood studio system was controlled by the “Big Eight” studios; however, the Big Five fully integrated studios were the most powerful. These five studios were MGM, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, and RKO. They all operated their own theater chains and produced and distributed films as well. The “Little Three” studios (Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists) were also full-fledged film factories but they lacked the financial resources of the Big Five and therefore produced fewer A-class features which were the foundations of the studio system.

Periodization

The classical era began in 1917 with American innovations in narrative film-making. Hollywood classicism gradually declined with the collapse of the studio system, the advent of television, the rise of auterism, and the increasing influence of foreign films and independent filmmaking.

The End of an Era

The 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which outlawed the practice of block booking and the above-mentioned ownership and operation of theater chains by the major film studios (as it was believed to constitute anti-competitive and monopolistic trade practices), was seen as a major blow to the studio system. This was because, firstly, it cleared the way for a growing number of independent producers (some of them the actors themselves) and studios to produce their films free of major studio interference, and secondly, because it destroyed the original business model utilized by the studios who struggled to adapt.

"At the time of the Court decision, everyone said the quality, consistency and availability of movies would go up and prices would fall. Quite the opposite happened. By 1955, the number of produced films had fallen by 25 percent. More than 4,200 theaters (or 23 percent of the total) had shut their doors. More than half of those remaining were unable to earn a profit. They could not afford to rent and exhibit the best and most costly films, the ones most likely to compete with television."

Indeed, the American film industry nearly collapsed completely in the late 1950s. It experienced an artistic revival with New Hollywood in the mid-1960s and a commercial revival with VHS and Betamax tapes in the mid-1970s. However, many film scholars and film buffs agree that the artistic quality of films has not recovered to the likes of the Classical era.

Comparison to Modern Narrative Film-making

Classical American cinema derived its expressive power from the realism of its visual style and the humanity of its narrative style — and both gave a universality to its storytelling. Regarding narrative, American films have become much more focused on portraying the external/social causes that motivate a character rather than the internal/psychological ones. On the other hand, visually modern American cinema resembles classical cinema. Though the visual style has certainly changed since 1917 and lost some of its realism, films continue to follow the basic principles of classical continuity: linear time and spacial continuity.

Further reading

• Bordwell, David; Staiger, Janet; Thompson, Kristin (1985). The Classical Hollywood Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-06055-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)