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Part 1 The History of American Movies 美国电影发展史
Of all the products of popular culture, none is more sharply etched in our collective imagination than the movies. Most Americans instantly recognize images produced by the movies: Charlie Chaplin, the starving prospector in The Gold Rush, eating his shoe, treating the laces like spaghetti. Paul Muni, the jobless World War I veteran in I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, who is asked how he lives and replies, "I steal." Gloria Swanson, the fading movie goddess in Sunset Boulevard, belittling suggestions that she is no longer a big star: "It's the pictures that got small."
Movies are key cultural artifacts that offer a window into American cultural and social history. A mixture of art, business, and popular entertainment, the movies provide a host of insights into Americans' shifting ideals, fantasies, and preoccupations. Like any cultural artifact, the movies can be approached in a variety of ways. Cultural historians have treated movies as sociological documents that record the look and mood of particular historical settings; as ideological constructs that advance particular political or moral values or myths; as psychological texts that speak to individual and social anxieties and tensions; as cultural documents that present particular images of gender, ethnicity, class romance, and violence; and as visual texts that offer complex levels of meaning and seeing.
Beside Macy's Department Store in Herald Square New York City there is a plaque commemorating the first public showing of a motion picture on a screen in the United States. It was here, on April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City, that Thomas Alva Edison presented a show included scenes of the surf breaking on a beach, a comic boxing exhibition, and two young women dancing. A review in The New York Times described the exhibition as "all wonderfully real and singularly exhilarating."
The first successful efforts to project lifelike images on a screen took place in the mid-seventeenth century. By 1659, a Dutch scientist named Christiaen Huygens had invented the magic lantern, the forerunner of the modern slide projector, which he used to project medical drawings before an audience.
The first true moving images appeared in the 1820s, when the concept of the persistence of vision was used to create children's toys and other simple entertainments. The thaumatrope, which appeared in 1826, was a simple disk with separate images printed on each side (for example, a bird on one side and a cage on another). When rapidly spun, the images appeared to blend together (so that the bird seemed to be inside the cage). A simpler way to display movement was the flip book, which became popular by the late 1860s. Each page showed a subject in a subtly different position. When a reader flipped the book's pages, the pictures gave the illusion of movement.
In 1887, Thomas Edison gave William K.L. Dickson, one of his leading inventors, the task of developing a motion picture apparatus. Edison envisioned a machine "that should do for the eye what the phonograph did for the ear." Dickson initially modeled his device on Edison's phonograph, placing tiny pictures on a revolving drum. A light inside the drum was supposed to illuminate the pictures. Then he decided to use the flexible celluloid film that George Eastman had invented in 1880 and had begun to use in his Kodak camera. Dickson added perforations to the edge of the film strip to help it feed evenly into his camera.
To display their films, Dickson and Edison devised a coin-operated peepshow device called a "kinetoscope." Because the kinetoscope could only hold fifty feet of film, its films lasted just 35 to 40 seconds. This was too brief to tell a story; the first kinetoscope films were simply scenes of everyday life, like the first film "Fred Ott's Sneeze," reenactments of historical events, photographed bits of vaudeville routines, and pictures of well-known celebrities. Nevertheless, the kinetoscope was an instant success. By 1894, coin-operated kinetoscopes had begun to appear in hotels, department stores, saloons, and amusement arcades called nickelodeons.
In 1894, the Lumiere brothers introduced the portable motion picture camera and projector.
Finally recognizing the potential of the motion picture projector, Edison entered into an agreement with a Washington, D.C. realtor, Thomas Armat, who had designed a workable projector. In April, 1896, the two men unveiled the Vitascope and presented the first motion pictures on a public screen in the United States.
Competition in the early movie industry was fierce. To force their competitors out of the industry, moviemakers turned to the courts, launching over two hundred patent infringement suits. To protect their profits and bring order to the industry, Edison and a number of his competitors decided to cooperate by establishing the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1909, consisting of six American companies and two French firms. Members of the trust agreed that only they had the right to make, print, or distribute cameras, projectors, or films. The trust also negotiated an exclusive agreement with Eastman Kodak for commercial quality film stock.
During film's first decade from 1896 to 1905 movies were little more than a novelty, often used as a "chaser" to signal the end of a show in a vaudeville theater. These early films are utterly unlike anything seen today. They lasted just seven to ten minutes -too brief to tell anything more than the simplest story. They used a cast of anonymous actors for the simple reason that the camera was set back so far that it was impossible to clearly make out the actors' faces. As late as 1908, a movie actor made no more than $8 a day and received no credit on the screen.
In 1905, hundreds of little movie theaters opened, called nickelodeons, since they sold admission nickel by nickel. By 1908, there were an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 nickelodeons. Contrary to popular belief, the nickelodeon's audience was not confined to the poor, the young, or the immigrant. From the start, theaters were situated in rural areas and middle class neighborhoods as well as working-class neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the movies attracted audiences of an unprecedented size, as a result of their low admission prices, "democratic" seating arrangements, convenient time schedules (films were shown again and again), and lack of spoken dialogue, which allowed non- English speaking immigrants to enjoy films.
By 1907, narrative films had begun to increase in number. But most films still emphasized stunts and chases and real life events-like scenes of yacht races or train crashes--and were rented or sold by the foot regardless of subject matter. Exhibitors were expected to assemble scenes together to form a larger show.
The formation of the movie trust ushered in a period of rationalization within the film industry. Camera and projecting equipment was standardized; film rental fees were fixed; theaters were upgraded; and the practice of selling films outright ended, which improved the quality of movies by removing damaged prints from circulation. This was also a period intense artistic and technical innovation, as pioneering directors like David Wark Griffith and others created a new language of film and revolutionized screen narrative.
By focusing the camera on particular actors and actresses, Griffith inadvertently encouraged the development of the star system. As early as 1910, newspapers were deluged with requests for actors' names. But most studios refused to divulge their identities, fearing the salary demands of popular performers. But the film trust's leading opponent, Carl Laemmle, was convinced that the key to the financial stability lay in producing films featuring popular stars. As one industry observer put it, "In the 'star' your producer gets not only a 'production' value...but a 'trademark' value, and an 'insurance' value which are...very potent in guaranteeing the sale of this product." In 1910, Laemmle produced the first star; he lured Florence Lawrence, the most popular anonymous star, away from Biograph, and launched an unprecedented publicity campaign on her behalf. As the star system emerged, salaries soared. In the course of just two years, the salary of actress Mary Pickford rose from less than $400 a week in 1914 to $10,000 a week in 1916.
During the second decade of the twentieth century, immigrants like Laemmle and Zukor came to dominate the movie business. Unlike Edison and the other American-born, Protestant businessmen who had controlled the early film industry, these immigrant entrepreneurs had a better sense of what the public wanted to see. Virtually all of these new producers emigrated to the United States from central Europe and were Jewish. Less conservative than the American-born producers, they were more willing to experiment with such innovations as the star system and feature-length productions. Since many had come to the film industry from the garment and fur trades where fashions change rapidly and the successful businessman is one who stays constantly in touch with the latest styles, they tried to give the public what it wanted.
As Samuel Goldwyn, one of the leading moguls, noted, "If the audience don't like a picture, they have a good reason. The public is never wrong. I don't go for all this thing that when I have a failure, it is because the audience doesn't have the taste or education, or isn't sensitive enough. The public pays money. It wants to be entertained. That's all I know." With this philosophy the outsiders wrestled control over the industry away from the American-born producers.
During the 1920s and 1930s, a small group of film companies consolidated their control. Known as the "Big Five" - Paramount, Warner Brothers, RKO, 20th Century-Fox, and Lowe's (MGM) and the "Little Three" - Universal, Columbia, and United Artists, they formed fully integrated companies. With the exception of United Artists, which was solely a distribution company, the "majors" owned their own production facilities, ran their own worldwide distribution networks, and controlled theater chains that were committed to showing the company's products. And at the head of each major studio was a powerful mogul such giants as Adolph Zukor, Wiliam Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, Harry Cohn, Joseph Schenck, and the Warner Brothers who determined what the public was going to see. It was their vision--patriotic, sentimental, secular, and generally politically conservative which millions of Americans shared weekly at local movie theaters.
During the 1920s, movie attendance soared. By the middle of the decade, 50 million people a week went to the movies - the equivalent of half the nation's population. In Chicago, in 1929, theaters had enough seats for half the city's population to attend a movie each day.
In 1926, Warner Brothers released the film Don Juan--the first film with a synchronized film score--along with a program of talking shorts. The popularity of The Jazz Singer, which was released in 1927, erased any doubts about the popular appeal of sound, and within a year, 300 theaters were wired for sound.
The arrival of sound produced a sharp upsurge in movie attendance, which jumped from 50 million a week in the mid-20s to 110 million in 1929. But it also produced a number of fundamental transformations in the movies themselves. As Robert Ray has shown, sound made the movies more American. The introduction of sound also encouraged new film genres--like the musical, the gangster film, and comedies that relied on wit rather than slapstick.
In addition, the talkies dramatically changed the movie- going experience, especially for the working class. Where many working class audiences had provided silent films with a spoken dialogue, movie-goers were now expected to remain quiet. As one film historian has observed: "The talking audience for silent pictures became a silent audience for talking pictures. "Moreover, the stage shows and other forms of live entertainment that had appeared in silent movie houses increasingly disappeared, replaced by newsreels and animated shorts.
The film industry changed radically after World War II, and this change altered the style and content of the films made in Hollywood. After experiencing boom years from 1939 to 1946, the film industry began a long period of decline. Within just seven years, attendance and box receipts fell to half their 1946 levels.
During the 1940s, a new film genre--known as film noir-- arose, which gave tangible expression to the psychic confusion of a nation that had won the largest war in history but faced even greater uncertainties in peacetime. Though film noir received its named from French film critics and was heavily influenced by German expressionist film making techniques, it stands out as one of the most original and innovative American movie genres.
After the war, Hollywood's audience not only shrank, it also fragmented into distinct subgroups. An audience interested in serious social problem films expanded. During the postwar period Hollywood produced a growing number addressing such problems as ethnic and racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, sufferings of maltreated mental patients, and the problems of alcohol and drug addiction. The growing popularity of science fiction thrillers also reflected the emergence of the youth market and the spread of a certain paranoid style during the Cold War years.
As the 1960s began, few would have guessed that the decade would be one of the most socially conscious and stylistically innovative in Hollywood's history. Among the most popular films at the decade's start were Doris Day romantic comedies like That Touch of Mink (1962) and epic blockbusters like The Longest Day (1962), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Cleopatra (1963). Yet, as the decade progressed, Hollywood radically shifted focus and began to produce an increasing number of anti-establishment films, laced with social commentary, directed at the growing youth market. Two films released in 1967--Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate--awoke Hollywood to the size and influence of the youth audience.
A number of most influential films of the late '60s and early '70s sought to revise older film genres--like the war film, the crime film, and the western--and rewrite Hollywood's earlier versions of American history from a more critical perspective. Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) revised and enhanced the gangster genre by transforming it into a critical commentary on an immigrant family's pursuit of the American dream.
During the mid- and late-70s, the mood of American films shifted sharply. Unlike the highly politicized films of the early part of the decade, the most popular films of the late 1970s and early 1980s were escapist blockbusters like Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)-- featuring spectacular special effects, action, and simplistic conflicts between good and evil--inspirational tales of the indomitable human spirit, like Rocky (1976)--or nostalgia for a more innocent past--like Animal House (1978) and Grease (1978).
In a 1992 bestseller Hollywood vs. America, Michael Medved, co-host of public television's Sneak Previews, described Hollywood as a "poison factory," befouling America's moral atmosphere and assaulting the country's "most cherished values." Today's films, he argued, use their enormous capacity to influence opinion by glamorizing violence, maligning marriage, mocking authority, promoting sexual promiscuity, ridiculing religion, and bombarding viewers with an endless stream of profanity, gratuitous sex, and loutish forms of behavior. Where once the movies offered sentiment, elegance, and romance, now, Medved contends, ideologically-motivated producers and directors promote their own divisive agenda: anti-religion, anti-family, anti-military.
Nevertheless, as the movie industry enters its second century, many Americans worry about Hollywood's future. Medved is not alone in complaining that "they don't make movies like they used to." A basic problem facing today's Hollywood is the rapidly rising cost of making and marketing a movie: an average of $40 million today. The immense cost of producing movies has led the studios to seek guaranteed hits: blockbuster loaded with high-tech special effects, sequels, and remakes of earlier movies, foreign films, and even old TV shows.
For a century, the movie industry has been the nation's most important purveyor of culture and entertainment to the masses, playing a critical role in the shift from Victorian to distinctively modern, consumer values; from a world of words to a visual culture; from a society rooted in islands of localities and ethnic groups to a commercialized mass culture. The movies taught Americans how to kiss, make love, conceive of gender roles, and understand their place in the world. Whether film will continue to serve as the nation's preeminent instrument of cultural expression--reflecting and also shaping values and cultural ideals--remains to be seen.
