5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W.

Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

Home keyboard_arrow_right Entertainment & Pop Culture keyboard_arrow_right Movies

history of film more_vert Actions

Written by Robert Sklar , David A. Cook See All
Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

menu search
Last Updated: Article History
account_circlekeyboard_arrow_down Subscribe

toc Table of Contents

0:11 -5:04

zoom_in

The Passion of Joan of Arc

See all media

Related Topics: film

See all related content →

history of film, also called history of the motion picture, history of cinema from the 19th century to the present.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Early years, 1830–1910

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 1/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

Origins

The illusion of films is based on the optical phenomena known as persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon. The first
of these causes the brain to retain images cast upon the retina of the eye for a fraction of a second beyond their
disappearance from the field of sight, while the latter creates apparent movement between images when they succeed one
another rapidly. Together these phenomena permit the succession of still frames on a film strip to represent continuous
movement when projected at the proper speed (traditionally 16 frames per second for silent films and 24 frames per
second for sound films). Before the invention of photography, a variety of optical toys exploited this effect by mounting
successive phase drawings of things in motion on the face of a twirling disk (the phenakistoscope, c. 1832) or inside a
rotating drum (the zoetrope, c. 1834). Then, in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a French painter, perfected the
positive photographic process known as daguerreotype, and that same year the English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot
successfully demonstrated a negative photographic process that theoretically allowed unlimited positive prints to be
produced from each negative. As photography was innovated and refined over the next few decades, it became possible to
replace the phase drawings in the early optical toys and devices with individually posed phase photographs, a practice that
was widely and popularly carried out.

zoom_in

Eadweard Muybridge

There would be no true motion pictures, however, until live action could be photographed spontaneously and
simultaneously. This required a reduction in exposure time from the hour or so necessary for the pioneer photographic
processes to the one-hundredth (and, ultimately, one-thousandth) of a second achieved in 1870. It also required the
development of the technology of series photography by the British American photographer Eadweard Muybridge between
1872 and 1877. During that time, Muybridge was employed by Gov. Leland Stanford of California, a zealous racehorse
breeder, to prove that at some point in its gallop a running horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at once. Conventions of
19th-century illustration suggested otherwise, and the movement itself occurred too rapidly for perception by the naked
eye, so Muybridge experimented with multiple cameras to take successive photographs of horses in motion. Finally, in

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 2/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

1877, he set up a battery of 12 cameras along a Sacramento racecourse with wires stretched across the track to operate their
shutters. As a horse strode down the track, its hooves tripped each shutter individually to expose a successive photograph
of the gallop, confirming Stanford’s belief. When Muybridge later mounted these images on a rotating disk and projected
them on a screen through a magic lantern, they produced a “moving picture” of the horse at full gallop as it had actually
occurred in life.

Britannica Quiz

Match the Quote to the Movie Quiz

The French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey took the first series photographs with a single instrument in 1882; once
again the impetus was the analysis of motion too rapid for perception by the human eye. Marey invented the
chronophotographic gun, a camera shaped like a rifle that recorded 12 successive photographs per second, in order to
study the movement of birds in flight. These images were imprinted on a rotating glass plate (later, paper roll film), and
Marey subsequently attempted to project them. Like Muybridge, however, Marey was interested in deconstructing
movement rather than synthesizing it, and he did not carry his experiments much beyond the realm of high-speed, or
instantaneous, series photography. Muybridge and Marey, in fact, conducted their work in the spirit of scientific inquiry;
they both extended and elaborated existing technologies in order to probe and analyze events that occurred beyond the
threshold of human perception. Those who came after would return their discoveries to the realm of normal human vision
and exploit them for profit.

In 1887 in Newark, New Jersey, an Episcopalian minister named Hannibal Goodwin developed the idea of using celluloid
as a base for photographic emulsions. The inventor and industrialist George Eastman, who had earlier experimented with
sensitized paper rolls for still photography, began manufacturing celluloid roll film in 1889 at his plant in Rochester, New
York. This event was crucial to the development of cinematography: series photography such as Marey’s
chronophotography could employ glass plates or paper strip film because it recorded events of short duration in a relatively
small number of images, but cinematography would inevitably find its subjects in longer, more complicated events,
requiring thousands of images and therefore just the kind of flexible but durable recording medium represented by
celluloid. It remained for someone to combine the principles embodied in the apparatuses of Muybridge and Marey with
celluloid strip film to arrive at a viable motion-picture camera.

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content.

Subscribe Now

Such a device was created by French-born inventor Louis Le Prince in the late 1880s. He shot several short films in Leeds,
England, in 1888, and the following year he began using the newly invented celluloid film. He was scheduled to show his
work in New York City in 1890, but he disappeared while traveling in France. The exhibition never occurred, and Le
Prince’s contribution to cinema remained little known for decades. Instead it was William Kennedy Laurie Dickson,
working in the West Orange, New Jersey, laboratories of the Edison Company, who created what was widely regarded as
the first motion-picture camera.

Listen to article 10 minutes

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 3/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

Edison and the Lumière brothers

zoom_in

strip Kinetograph movie camera

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and it quickly became the most popular home-entertainment device of
the century. Seeking to provide a visual accompaniment to the phonograph, Edison commissioned Dickson, a young
laboratory assistant, to invent a motion-picture camera in 1888. Building upon the work of Muybridge and Marey, Dickson
combined the two final essentials of motion-picture recording and viewing technology. These were a device, adapted from
the escapement mechanism of a clock, to ensure the intermittent but regular motion of the film strip through the camera
and a regularly perforated celluloid film strip to ensure precise synchronization between the film strip and the shutter.
Dickson’s camera, the Kinetograph, initially imprinted up to 50 feet (15 metres) of celluloid film at the rate of about 40
frames per second.

Dickson was not the only person who had been tackling the problem of recording and reproducing moving images.
Inventors throughout the world had been trying for years to devise working motion-picture machines. In fact, several
European inventors, including the Englishman William Friese-Greene, applied for patents on various cameras, projectors,
and camera-projector combinations contemporaneously or even before Edison and his associates did.

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 4/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

zoom_in
keyboard_arrow_right

Kinetoscope

Because Edison had originally conceived of motion pictures as an adjunct to his phonograph, he did not commission the
invention of a projector to accompany the Kinetograph. Rather, he had Dickson design a type of peep-show viewing device
called the Kinetoscope, in which a continuous 47-foot (14-metre) film loop ran on spools between an incandescent lamp
and a shutter for individual viewing. Starting in 1894, Kinetoscopes were marketed commercially through the firm of Raff
and Gammon for $250 to $300 apiece. The Edison Company established its own Kinetograph studio (a single-room
building called the “Black Maria” that rotated on tracks to follow the sun) in West Orange, New Jersey, to supply films for
the Kinetoscopes that Raff and Gammon were installing in penny arcades, hotel lobbies, amusement parks, and other such
semipublic places. In April of that year the first Kinetoscope parlour was opened in a converted storefront in New York
City. The parlour charged 25 cents for admission to a bank of five machines.

The syndicate of Maguire and Baucus acquired the foreign rights to the Kinetoscope in 1894 and began to market the
machines. Edison opted not to file for international patents on either his camera or his viewing device, and, as a result, the
machines were widely and legally copied throughout Europe, where they were modified and improved far beyond the
https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 5/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

American originals. In fact, it was a Kinetoscope exhibition in Paris that inspired the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis,
to invent the first commercially viable projector. Their cinématographe, which functioned as a camera and printer as well
as a projector, ran at the economical speed of 16 frames per second. It was given its first commercial demonstration on
December 28, 1895.

Unlike the Kinetograph, which was battery-driven and weighed more than 1,000 pounds (453 kg), the cinématographe
was hand-cranked, lightweight (less than 20 pounds [9 kg]), and relatively portable. This naturally affected the kinds of
films that were made with each machine: Edison films initially featured material such as circus or vaudeville acts that could
be taken into a small studio to perform before an inert camera, while early Lumière films were mainly documentary views,
or “actualities,” shot outdoors on location. In both cases, however, the films themselves were composed of a single
unedited shot emphasizing lifelike movement; they contained little or no narrative content. (After a few years design
changes in the machines made it possible for Edison and the Lumières to shoot the same kinds of subjects.) In general,
Lumière technology became the European standard during the early era, and, because the Lumières sent their cameramen
all over the world in search of exotic subjects, the cinématographe became the founding instrument of distant cinemas in
Russia, Australia, and Japan.

zoom_in

Vitascope

In the United States the Kinetoscope installation business had reached the saturation point by the summer of 1895,
although it was still quite profitable for Edison as a supplier of films. Raff and Gammon persuaded Edison to buy the rights
to a state-of-the-art projector, developed by Thomas Armat of Washington, D.C., which incorporated a superior
intermittent movement mechanism and a loop-forming device (known as the Latham loop, after its earliest promoters,
Grey Latham and Otway Latham) to reduce film breakage, and in early 1896 Edison began to manufacture and market this
machine as his own invention. Given its first public demonstration on April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in
New York City, the Edison Vitascope brought projection to the United States and established the format for American film
exhibition for the next several years. It also encouraged the activities of such successful Edison rivals as the American

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 6/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

Mutoscope and Biograph Company, which was formed in 1896 to exploit the Mutoscope peep-show device and the
American Biograph camera and projector patented by W.K.L. Dickson in 1896. During this time, which has been
characterized as the “novelty period,” emphasis fell on the projection device itself, and films achieved their main popularity
as self-contained vaudeville attractions. Vaudeville houses, locked in intense competition at the turn of the century,
headlined the name of the machines rather than the films (e.g., “The Vitascope—Edison’s Latest Marvel,” “The Amazing
Cinématographe”). The producer, or manufacturer, supplied projectors along with an operator and a program of shorts.
These films, whether they were Edison-style theatrical variety shorts or Lumière-style actualities, were perceived by their
original audiences not as motion pictures in the modern sense of the term but as “animated photographs” or “living
pictures,” emphasizing their continuity with more familiar media of the time.

During the novelty period, the film industry was autonomous and unitary, with production companies leasing a complete
film service of projector, operator, and shorts to the vaudeville market as a single, self-contained act. Starting about 1897,
however, manufacturers began to sell both projectors and films to itinerant exhibitors who traveled with their programs
from one temporary location (vaudeville theatres, fairgrounds, circus tents, lyceums) to another as the novelty of their
films wore off at a given site. This new mode of screening by circuit marked the first separation of exhibition from
production and gave the exhibitors a large measure of control over early film form, since they were responsible for
arranging the one-shot films purchased from the producers into audience-pleasing programs. The putting together of these
programs—which often involved narration, sound effects, and music—was in effect a primitive form of editing, so that it is
possible to regard the itinerant projectionists working between 1896 and 1904 as the earliest directors of motion pictures.
Several of them, notably Edwin S. Porter, were, in fact, hired as directors by production companies after the industry
stabilized in the first decade of the 20th century.

By encouraging the practice of peripatetic exhibition, the American producers’ policy of outright sales inhibited the
development of permanent film theatres in the United States until nearly a decade after their appearance in Europe, where
England and France had taken an early lead in both production and exhibition. Britain’s first projector, the theatrograph
(later the animatograph), had been demonstrated in 1896 by the scientific-instrument maker Robert W. Paul. In 1899 Paul
formed his own production company for the manufacture of actualities and trick films, and until 1905 Paul’s Animatograph
Works, Ltd., was England’s largest producer, turning out an average of 50 films per year. Between 1896 and 1898, two
Brighton photographers, George Albert Smith and James Williamson, constructed their own motion-picture cameras and
began producing trick films featuring superimpositions (The Corsican Brothers, 1897) and interpolated close-ups
(Grandma’s Reading Glass, 1900; The Big Swallow, 1901). Smith subsequently developed the first commercially
successful photographic colour process (Kinemacolor, c. 1906–08, with Charles Urban), while Williamson experimented
with parallel editing as early as 1900 (Attack on a Chinese Mission Station) and became a pioneer of the chase film (Stop
Thief!, 1901; Fire!, 1901). Both Smith and Williamson had built studios at Brighton by 1902 and, with their associates,
came to be known as members of the “Brighton school,” although they did not represent a coherent movement. Another
important early British filmmaker was Cecil Hepworth, whose Rescued by Rover (1905) is regarded by many historians as
the most skillfully edited narrative produced before the Biograph shorts of D.W. Griffith.

Listen to article 16 minutes

Méliès and Porter

The shift in consciousness away from films as animated photographs to films as stories, or narratives, began to take place
about the turn of the century and is most evident in the work of the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Méliès was a
professional magician who had become interested in the illusionist possibilities of the cinématographe; when the Lumières
refused to sell him one, he bought an animatograph projector from Paul in 1896 and reversed its mechanical principles to
design his own camera. The following year he organized the Star Film company and constructed a small glass-enclosed
studio on the grounds of his house at Montreuil, where he produced, directed, photographed, and acted in more than 500
films between 1896 and 1913.

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 7/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

zoom_in
keyboard_arrow_right

Le Voyage dans la Lune

Initially Méliès used stop-motion photography (the camera and action are stopped while something is added to or removed
from the scene; then filming and action are continued) to make one-shot “trick” films in which objects disappeared and
reappeared or transformed themselves into other objects entirely. These films were widely imitated by producers in
England and the United States. Soon, however, Méliès began to experiment with brief multiscene films, such as L’Affaire
Dreyfus (The Dreyfus Affair, 1899), his first, which followed the logic of linear temporality to establish causal sequences
and tell simple stories. By 1902 he had produced the influential 30-scene narrative Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the
Moon). Adapted from a novel by Jules Verne, it was nearly one reel in length (about 825 feet [251 metres], or 14 minutes).

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 8/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

zoom_in

Le Voyage dans la Lune

The first film to achieve international distribution (mainly through piracy), Le Voyage dans la Lune was an enormous
popular success. It helped to make Star Film one of the world’s largest producers (an American branch was opened in
1903) and to establish the fiction film as the cinema’s mainstream product. In both respects Méliès dethroned the
Lumières’ cinema of actuality. Despite his innovations, Méliès’s productions remained essentially filmed stage plays. He
conceived them quite literally as successions of living pictures or, as he termed them, “artificially arranged scenes.” From
his earliest trick films through his last successful fantasy, La Conquête du pole (“The Conquest of the Pole,” 1912), Méliès
treated the frame of the film as the proscenium arch of a theatre stage, never once moving his camera or changing its
position within a scene. He ultimately lost his audience in the late 1910s to filmmakers with more sophisticated narrative
techniques.

The origination of many such techniques is closely associated with the work of Edwin S. Porter, a freelance projectionist
and engineer who joined the Edison Company in 1900 as production head of its new skylight studio on East 21st Street in
New York City. For the next few years, he served as director-cameraman for much of Edison’s output, starting with simple
one-shot films (Kansas Saloon Smashers, 1901) and progressing rapidly to trick films (The Finish of Bridget McKeen,
1901) and short multiscene narratives based on political cartoons and contemporary events (Sampson-Schley Controversy,
1901; Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison, 1901). Porter also filmed the extraordinary Pan-American
Exposition by Night (1901), which used time-lapse photography to produce a circular panorama of the exposition’s
electrical illumination, and the 10-scene Jack and the Beanstalk (1902), a narrative that simulates the sequencing of
lantern slides to achieve a logical, if elliptical, spatial continuity.

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 9/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

Britannica Quiz

Match the Quote to the Movie Quiz

It was probably Porter’s experience as a projectionist at the Eden Musée theatre in 1898 that ultimately led him in the early
1900s to the practice of continuity editing. The process of selecting one-shot films and arranging them into a 15-minute
program for screen presentation was very much like that of constructing a single film out of a series of separate shots.
Porter, by his own admission, was also influenced by other filmmakers—especially Méliès, whose Le Voyage dans la Lune
he came to know well in the process of duplicating it for illegal distribution by Edison in October 1902. Years later Porter
claimed that the Méliès film had given him the notion of “telling a story in continuity form,” which resulted in The Life of
an American Fireman (about 400 feet [122 metres], or six minutes, produced in late 1902 and released in January 1903).
This film, which was also influenced by James Williamson’s Fire!, combined archival footage with staged scenes to create a
nine-shot narrative of a dramatic rescue from a burning building. It was for years the subject of controversy because in a
later version the last two scenes were intercut, or crosscut, into a 14-shot parallel sequence. It is now generally believed
that in the earliest version of the film these scenes, which repeat the same rescue operation from an interior and exterior
point of view, were shown in their entirety, one after the other. This repetition, or overlapping continuity, which owes
much to magic lantern shows, clearly defines the spatial relationships between scenes but leaves temporal relationships
underdeveloped and, to modern sensibilities, confused. Contemporary audiences, however, were conditioned by lantern
slide projections and even comic strips; they understood a sequence of motion-picture shots to be a series of individual
moving photographs, each of which was self-contained within its frame. Spatial relationships were clear in such earlier
narrative forms because their only medium was space.

play_arrow

The Great Train RobberySee all videos for this article

Motion pictures, however, exist in time as well as space, and the major problem for early filmmakers was the establishment
of temporal continuity from one shot to the next. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) is widely acknowledged to be
the first narrative film to have achieved such continuity of action. Comprising 14 separate shots of noncontinuous,
nonoverlapping action, the film contains an early example of parallel editing, two credible back, or rear, projections (the
projection from the rear of previously filmed action or scenery onto a translucent screen to provide the background for new
action filmed in front of the screen), two camera pans, and several shots composed diagonally and staged in depth—a
major departure from the frontally composed, theatrical staging of Méliès.

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 10/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

zoom_in

The Great Train Robbery

The industry’s first spectacular box-office success, The Great Train Robbery is credited with establishing the realistic
narrative, as opposed to Méliès-style fantasy, as the commercial cinema’s dominant form. The film’s popularity encouraged
investors and led to the establishment of the first permanent film theatres, or nickelodeons, across the country. Running
about 12 minutes, it also helped to boost standard film length toward one reel, or 1,000 feet (305 metres [about 16 minutes
at the average silent speed]). Despite the film’s success, Porter continued to practice overlapping action in such
conventional narratives as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) and the social justice dramas The Ex-Convict (1904) and The
Kleptomaniac (1905). He experimented with model animation in The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906) and The Teddy
Bears (1907) but lost interest in the creative aspects of filmmaking as the process became increasingly industrialized. He
left Edison in 1909 to pursue a career as a producer and equipment manufacturer. Porter, like Méliès, could not adapt to
the linear narrative modes and assembly-line production systems that were developing.

Early growth of the film industry

Méliès’s decline was assisted by the industrialization of the French and, for a time, the entire European cinema by the
Pathé Frères company, founded in 1896 by the former phonograph importer Charles Pathé. Financed by some of France’s
largest corporations, Pathé acquired the Lumière patents in 1902 and commissioned the design of an improved studio
camera that soon dominated the market on both sides of the Atlantic (it has been estimated that, before 1918, 60 percent of
all films were shot with a Pathé camera). Pathé also manufactured his own film stock and in 1902 established a vast
production facility at Vincennes where films were turned out on an assembly-line basis under the managing direction of
Ferdinand Zecca. The following year, Pathé began to open foreign sales agencies, which would soon become full-blown
production companies—Hispano Film (1906), Pathé-Rouss, Moscow (1907), Film d’Arte Italiano (1909), Pathé-Britannia,
London (1909), and Pathé-America (1910). He acquired permanent exhibition sites, building the world’s first luxury

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 11/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

cinema (the Omnia-Pathé) in Paris in 1906. In 1911 Pathé became Méliès’s distributor and helped to drive Star Film out of
business.

Pathé’s only serious rival on the Continent at this time was Gaumont Pictures, founded by the engineer-inventor Léon
Gaumont in 1895. Though never more than one-fourth the size of Pathé, Gaumont followed the same pattern of expansion,
manufacturing its own equipment and mass-producing films under a supervising director (through 1906, Alice Guy, the
cinema’s first female director; afterward, Louis Feuillade). Like Pathé, Gaumont opened foreign offices and acquired
theatre chains. From 1905 to 1914 its studios at La Villette, France, were the largest in the world. Pathé and Gaumont
dominated pre-World War I motion-picture production, exhibition, and sales in Europe, and they effectively brought to an
end the artisanal mode of filmmaking practiced by Méliès and his British contemporaries.

In the United States a similar pattern was emerging through the formation of film exchanges and the consolidation of an
industrywide monopoly based on the pooling of patent rights. About 1897 producers had adopted the practice of selling
prints outright, which had the effect of promoting itinerant exhibition and discriminating against the owners of permanent
sites. In 1903, in response to the needs of theatre owners, Harry J. Miles and Herbert Miles opened a film exchange in San
Francisco. The exchange functioned as a broker between producers and exhibitors, buying prints from the former and
leasing them to the latter for 25 percent of the purchase price (in subsequent practice, rental fees were calculated on
individual production costs and box-office receipts). The exchange system of distribution quickly caught on because it
profited nearly everyone: the new middlemen made fortunes by collecting multiple revenues on the same prints; exhibitors
were able to reduce their overheads and vary their programs without financial risk; and, ultimately, producers experienced
a tremendous surge in demand for their product as exhibition and distribution boomed nationwide. (Between November
1906 and March 1907, for example, producers increased their weekly output from 10,000 to 28,000 feet [3,000 to 8,500
metres] and still could not meet demand.)

The most immediate effect of the rapid rise of the distribution sector was the nickelodeon boom, the exponential growth of
permanent film theatres in the United States from a mere handful in 1904 to between 8,000 and 10,000 by 1908. Named
for the Nickelodeon (ersatz Greek for “nickel theatre”), which opened in Pittsburgh in 1905, these theatres were makeshift
facilities lodged in converted storefronts. They showed approximately an hour’s worth of films for an admission price of 5
to 10 cents. Originally identified with working-class audiences, nickelodeons appealed increasingly to the middle class as
the decade wore on, and they became associated with the rising popularity of the story film. Their spread also forced the
standardization of film length at one reel, or 1,000 feet (305 metres), to facilitate high-efficiency production and the
trading of products within the industry.

By 1908 there were about 20 motion-picture production companies operating in the United States. They were constantly at
war with one another over business practices and patent rights, and they had begun to fear that their fragmentation would
cause them to lose control of the industry to the two new sectors of distribution and exhibition. The most powerful among
them—Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Kalem, Selig Polyscope, Lubin, the American branches of the French Star
Film and Pathé Frères, and Kleine Optical, the largest domestic distributor of foreign films—therefore entered into a
collusive trade agreement to ensure their continued dominance. On September 9, 1908, these companies formed the
Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), pooling the 16 most significant U.S. patents for motion-picture technology and
entering into an exclusive contract with the Eastman Kodak Company for the supply of raw film stock.

The MPPC, also known as the “Trust,” sought to control every segment of the industry and therefore set up a licensing
system for assessing royalties. The use of its patents was granted only to licensed equipment manufacturers; film stock
could be sold only to licensed producers; licensed producers and importers were required to fix rental prices at a minimum
level and to set quotas for foreign footage to reduce competition; MPPC films could be sold only to licensed distributors,
who could lease them only to licensed exhibitors; and only licensed exhibitors had the right to use MPPC projectors and
rent company films. To solidify its control, in 1910—the same year in which motion-picture attendance in the United States
rose to 26 million persons a week—the MPPC formed the General Film Company, which integrated the licensed
distributors into a single corporate entity. Although it was clearly monopolistic in practice and intent, the MPPC helped to
stabilize the American film industry during a period of unprecedented growth and change by standardizing exhibition
practice, increasing the efficiency of distribution, and regularizing pricing in all three sectors. Its collusive nature, however,
provoked a reaction that ultimately destroyed it.

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 12/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

In a sense, the MPPC’s ironclad efforts to eliminate competition merely fostered it. Almost from the outset there was
widespread resistance to the MPPC on the part of independent distributors (numbering 10 or more in early 1909) and
exhibitors (estimated at 2,000 to 2,500), and in January 1909 they formed their own trade association, the Independent
Film Protective Association—reorganized that fall as the National Independent Moving Picture Alliance—to provide
financial and legal support against the Trust. A more effective and powerful anti-Trust organization was the Motion Picture
Distributing and Sales Company, which began operation in May 1910 (three weeks after the inception of General Film) and
which eventually came to serve 47 exchanges in 27 cities. For nearly two years, independents were able to present a united
front through the company, which finally split into two rival camps in the spring of 1912 (the Mutual Film Corporation and
the Universal Film Manufacturing Company).

By imitating MPPC practices of joining forces and licensing, the early independents were able to compete effectively
against the Trust in its first three years of operation, netting about 40 percent of all American film business. In fact, their
product, the one-reel short, and their mode of operation were initially fundamentally the same as the MPPC’s. The
independents later revolutionized the industry, however, by adopting the multiple-reel film as their basic product, a move
that caused the MPPC to embrace the one-reeler with a vengeance, hastening its own demise.

Listen to article 13 minutes

The silent years, 1910–27

Pre-World War I American cinema

zoom_in

Queen Elizabeth

Multiple-reel films had appeared in the United States as early as 1907, when Adolph Zukor distributed Pathé’s three-reel
Passion Play, but when Vitagraph produced the five-reel The Life of Moses in 1909, the MPPC forced it to be released in
serial fashion at the rate of one reel a week. The multiple-reel film—which came to be called a “feature,” in the vaudevillian
sense of a headline attraction—achieved general acceptance with the smashing success of the three-and-one-half-reel Les

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 13/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

Amours de la reine Élisabeth (Queen Elizabeth, 1912), which starred Sarah Bernhardt and was imported by Zukor (who
founded the independent Famous Players production company with its profits). In 1912 Enrico Guazzoni’s nine-reel Italian
superspectacle Quo Vadis? (“Whither Are You Going?”) was road-shown in legitimate theatres across the country at a top
admission price of one dollar, and the feature craze was on.

(Read Lillian Gish’s 1929 Britannica essay on silent film.)

At first there were difficulties in distributing features, because the exchanges associated with both the MPPC and the
independents were geared toward cheaply made one-reel shorts. Because of their more elaborate production values,
features had relatively higher negative costs. This was a disadvantage to distributors, who charged a uniform price per foot.
By 1914, however, several national feature-distribution alliances that correlated pricing with a film’s negative cost and box-
office receipts were organized. These new exchanges demonstrated the economic advantage of multiple-reel films over
shorts. Exhibitors quickly learned that features could command higher admission prices and longer runs; single-title
packages were also cheaper and easier to advertise than programs of multiple titles. As for manufacturing, producers found
that the higher expenditure for features was readily amortized by high volume sales to distributors, who in turn were eager
to share in the higher admission returns from the theatres. The whole industry soon reorganized itself around the
economics of the multiple-reel film, and the effects of this restructuring did much to give movies their characteristic
modern form.

Feature films made motion pictures respectable for the middle class by providing a format that was analogous to that of the
legitimate theatre and was suitable for the adaptation of middle-class novels and plays. This new audience had more
demanding standards than the older working-class one, and producers readily increased their budgets to provide high
technical quality and elaborate productions. The new viewers also had a more refined sense of comfort, which exhibitors
quickly accommodated by replacing their storefronts with large, elegantly appointed new theatres in the major urban
centres (one of the first was Mitchell L. Marks’s 3,300-seat Strand, which opened in the Broadway district of Manhattan in
1914). Known as “dream palaces” because of the fantastic luxuriance of their interiors, these houses had to show features
rather than a program of shorts to attract large audiences at premium prices. By 1916 there were more than 21,000 movie
theatres in the United States. Their advent marked the end of the nickelodeon era and foretold the rise of the Hollywood
studio system, which dominated urban exhibition from the 1920s to the ’50s. Before the new studio-based monopoly could
be established, however, the patents-based monopoly of the MPPC had to expire, and this it did about 1914 as a result of its
own basic assumptions.

More From Britannica

tap dance: Film

As conceived by Edison, the basic operating principle of the Trust was to control the industry through patents pooling and
licensing, an idea logical enough in theory but difficult to practice in the context of a dynamically changing marketplace.
Specifically, the Trust’s failure to anticipate the independents’ widespread and aggressive resistance to its policies cost it a
fortune in patent-infringement litigation. Furthermore, the Trust badly underestimated the importance of the feature film,
permitting the independents to claim this popular new product as entirely their own. Another issue that the MPPC
misjudged was the power of the marketing strategy known as the “star system.” Borrowed from the theatre industry, this
system involves the creation and management of publicity about key performers, or stars, to stimulate demand for their
films. Trust company producers used this kind of publicity after 1910, when Carl Laemmle of Independent Motion Pictures
(IMP) promoted Florence Lawrence into national stardom through a series of media stunts in St. Louis, Missouri, but they
never exploited the technique as forcefully or as imaginatively as the independents did. Finally, and most decisively, in
August 1912 the U.S. Justice Department brought suit against the MPPC for “restraint of trade” in violation of the Sherman
Antitrust Act. Delayed by countersuits and by World War I, the government’s case was eventually won, and the MPPC
formally dissolved in 1918, although it had been functionally inoperative since 1914.

The rise and fall of the MPPC was concurrent with the industry’s move to southern California. As a result of the
nickelodeon boom, some exhibitors—who showed three separate programs over a seven-day period—had begun to require
as many as 20 new films per week, and it became necessary to put production on a systematic year-round schedule.

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 14/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

Because most films were still shot outdoors in available light, such schedules could not be maintained in the vicinity of New
York City or Chicago, where the industry had originally located itself in order to take advantage of trained theatrical labour
pools. As early as 1907, production companies, such as Selig Polyscope, began to dispatch production units to warmer
climates during winter. It was soon clear that what producers required was a new industrial centre—one with warm
weather, a temperate climate, a variety of scenery, and other qualities (such as access to acting talent) essential to their
highly unconventional form of manufacturing.

Various companies experimented with location shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, in San Antonio, Texas, in Santa Fe, New
Mexico, and even in Cuba, but the ultimate site of the American film industry was a Los Angeles suburb (originally a small
industrial town) called Hollywood. It is generally thought that Hollywood’s distance from the MPPC’s headquarters in New
York City made it attractive to the independents, but MPPC members such as Selig, Kalem, Biograph, and Essanay had also
established facilities there by 1911 in response to a number of the region’s attractions. These included the temperate
climate required for year-round production (the U.S. Weather Bureau estimated that an average of 320 days per year were
sunny or clear); a wide range of topography within a 50-mile (80-km) radius of Hollywood, including mountains, valleys,
forests, lakes, islands, seacoast, and desert; the status of Los Angeles as a professional theatrical centre; the existence of a
low tax base; and the presence of cheap and plentiful labour and land. This latter factor enabled the newly arrived
production companies to buy up tens of thousands of acres of prime real estate on which to locate their studios, standing
sets, and backlots.

By 1915 approximately 15,000 workers were employed by the motion-picture industry in Hollywood, and more than 60
percent of American production was centred there. In that same year the trade journal Variety reported that capital
investment in American motion pictures—the business of artisanal craftsmen and fairground operators only a decade
before—had exceeded $500 million. The most powerful companies in the new film capital were the independents, who
were flush with cash from their conversion to feature production. These included the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation
(later Paramount Pictures, c. 1927), which was formed by a merger of Zukor’s Famous Players Company, Jesse L. Lasky’s
Feature Play Company, and the Paramount distribution exchange in 1916; Universal Pictures, founded by Carl Laemmle in
1912 by merging IMP with Powers, Rex, Nestor, Champion, and Bison; Goldwyn Picture Corporation, founded in 1916 by
Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) and Edgar Selwyn; Metro Picture Corporation and Louis B. Mayer Pictures, founded by
Louis B. Mayer in 1915 and 1917, respectively; and the Fox Film Corporation (later Twentieth Century–Fox, 1935), founded
by William Fox in 1915. After World War I these companies were joined by Loew’s, Inc. (parent corporation of MGM,
created by the merger of Metro, Goldwyn, and Mayer companies cited above, 1924), a national exhibition chain organized
by Marcus Loew and Nicholas Schenck in 1919; First National Pictures, Inc., a circuit of independent exhibitors who
established their own production facilities in Burbank, California, in 1922; Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc., founded by
Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack Warner in 1923; and Columbia Pictures, Inc., incorporated in 1924 by Harry and Jack
Cohn and Joe Brandt.

These organizations became the backbone of the Hollywood studio system, and the men who controlled them shared
several important traits. They were all independent exhibitors and distributors who had outwitted the Trust and earned
their success by manipulating finances in the postnickelodeon feature boom, merging production companies, organizing
national distribution networks, and ultimately acquiring vast theatre chains. They saw their business as basically a retailing
operation modeled on the practice of chain stores such as Woolworth’s and Sears. Not incidentally, these men were all
first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, most of them with little formal education, while the
audience they served was 90 percent Protestant and Catholic. This circumstance would become an issue during the 1920s,
when the movies became a mass medium that was part of the life of every U.S. citizen and when Hollywood became the
chief purveyor of American culture to the world.

Pre-World War I European cinema

Before World War I, European cinema was dominated by France and Italy. At Pathé Frères, director general Ferdinand
Zecca perfected the course comique, a uniquely Gallic version of the chase film, which inspired Mack Sennett’s Keystone
Kops, while the immensely popular Max Linder created a comic persona that would deeply influence the work of Charlie
Chaplin. The episodic crime film was pioneered by Victorin Jasset in the Nick Carter series, produced for the small Éclair

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 15/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

Company, but it remained for Gaumont’s Louis Feuillade to bring the genre to aesthetic perfection in the extremely
successful serials Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915–16), and Judex (1916).

Another influential phenomenon initiated in prewar France was the film d’art movement. It began with L’Assassinat du
duc de Guise (“The Assassination of the Duke of Guise,” 1908), directed by Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes of the
Comédie Française for the Société Film d’Art, which was formed for the express purpose of transferring prestigious stage
plays starring famous performers to the screen. L’Assassinat’s success inspired other companies to make similar films,
which came to be known as films d’art. These films were long on intellectual pedigree and short on narrative
sophistication. The directors simply filmed theatrical productions in toto, without adaptation. Their brief popularity
nevertheless created a context for the lengthy treatment of serious material in motion pictures and was directly
instrumental in the rise of the feature.

No country, however, was more responsible for the popularity of the feature than Italy. The Italian cinema’s lavishly
produced costume spectacles brought it international prominence in the years before the war. The prototypes of the genre,
by virtue of their epic material and length, were the Cines company’s six-reel Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of
Pompei), directed by Luigi Maggi in 1908, and its 10-reel remake, directed by Ernesto Pasquali in 1913; but it was Cines’s
nine-reel Quo Vadis? (“Whither Are You Going?,” 1912), with its huge three-dimensional sets re-creating ancient Rome
and its 5,000 extras, that established the standard for the superspectacle and briefly conquered the world market for
Italian motion pictures. Its successor, the Italia company’s 12-reel Cabiria (1914), was even more extravagant in its
historical reconstruction of the Second Punic War, from the burning of the Roman fleet at Syracuse to Hannibal crossing
the Alps and the sack of Carthage. The Italian superspectacle stimulated public demand for features and influenced such
important directors as Cecil B. DeMille, Ernst Lubitsch, and especially D.W. Griffith.

Listen to article 15 minutes

D.W. Griffith

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 16/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

zoom_in

D.W. Griffith

There has been a tendency in modern film scholarship to view the narrative form of motion pictures as a development of an
overall production system. Although narrative film was and continues to be strongly influenced by a combination of
economic, technological, and social factors, it also owes a great deal to the individual artists who viewed film as a medium
of personal expression. Chief among these innovators was D.W. Griffith. It is true that Griffith’s self-cultivated reputation
as a Romantic artist—“the father of film technique,” “the man who invented Hollywood,” “the Shakespeare of the screen,”
and the like—is somewhat overblown. It is also true that by 1908 film narrative had already been systematically organized
to accommodate the material conditions of production. Griffith’s work nevertheless transformed that system from its
primitive to its classical mode. He was the first filmmaker to realize that the motion-picture medium, properly vested with

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 17/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

technical vitality and seriousness of theme, could exercise enormous persuasive power over an audience, or even a nation,
without recourse to print or human speech.

Griffith began his film career in late 1907 as an actor. He was cast as the lead in the Edison Company’s Rescued from an
Eagle’s Nest (1907) and also appeared in many Biograph films. He had already attempted to make a living as a stage actor
and a playwright without much success, and his real goal in approaching the film companies seems to have been to sell
them scripts. In June 1908 Biograph gave him an opportunity to replace its ailing director, George (“Old Man”)
McCutcheon, on the chase film The Adventures of Dollie. With the advice of the company’s two cameramen, Billy Bitzer
(who would become Griffith’s personal cinematographer for much of his career) and Arthur Marvin (who actually shot the
film), Griffith turned in a fresh and exciting film. His work earned him a full-time director’s contract with Biograph, for
whom he directed more than 450 one- and two-reel films over the next five years.

In the Biograph films, Griffith experimented with all the narrative techniques he would later use in the epics The Birth of a
Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)—techniques that helped to formulate and stabilize Hollywood’s classical narrative
style. A few of these techniques were already in use when Griffith started; he simply refined them. Others were innovations
Griffith devised to solve practical problems in the course of production. Still others resulted from his conscious analogy
between film and literary narrative, chiefly Victorian novels and plays. In all cases, however, Griffith brought to the
practice of filmmaking a seriousness of purpose and an intensity of vision that, combined with his intuitive mastery of film
technique, made him the first great artist of the cinema.

Griffith’s first experiments were in the field of editing and involved varying the standard distance between the audience
and the screen. In Greaser’s Gauntlet, made one month after Dollie, he first used a cut-in from a long shot to a full shot to
heighten the emotional intensity of a scene. In an elaboration of this practice, he was soon taking shots from multiple
camera setups—long shots, full shots, medium shots, close shots, and, ultimately, close-ups—and combining their separate
perspectives into single dramatic scenes. By October 1908 Griffith was practicing parallel editing between the dual
narratives of After Many Years, and the following year he extended the technique to the representation of three
simultaneous actions in The Lonely Villa, cutting rapidly back and forth between a band of robbers breaking into a
suburban villa, a woman and her children barricaded within, and the husband rushing from town to the rescue. This type
of crosscutting, or intercutting, came to be known as the “Griffith last-minute rescue” and was employed as a basic
structural principle in both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. It not only employed the rapid alternation of shots but
also called for the shots themselves to be held for shorter and shorter durations as the parallel lines of action converged; in
its ability to create the illusion of simultaneous actions, the intercut chase sequence prefigured Soviet theories of montage
by at least a decade, and it remains a basic component of narrative film form to this day.

Another area of experiment for Griffith involved camera movement and placement, most of which had been purely
functional before him. When Biograph started sending his production unit to southern California in 1910, Griffith began to
practice panoramic panning shots not only to provide visual information but also to engage his audience in the total
environment of his films. Later he would prominently employ the tracking, or traveling, shot, in which the camera—and
therefore the audience—participates in the dramatic action by moving with it. In California, Griffith discovered that camera
angle could be used to comment upon the content of a shot or to heighten its dramatic emphasis in a way that the
conventionally mandated head-on medium shot could not; and, at a time when convention dictated the flat and uniform
illumination of every element in a scene, he pioneered the use of expressive lighting to create mood and atmosphere. Like
so many of the other devices he brought into general use, these had all been employed by earlier directors, but Griffith was
the first to practice them with the care of an artist and to rationalize them within the overall structure of his films.

Griffith’s one-reelers grew increasingly complex between 1911 and 1912, and he began to realize that only a longer and
more expansive format could contain his vision. At first he made such two-reel films as Enoch Arden (1911), Man’s Genesis
(1912), The Massacre (1912), and The Mothering Heart (1913), but these went virtually unnoticed by a public enthralled
with such recent features from Europe as Queen Elizabeth and Quo Vadis? Finally Griffith determined to make an epic
himself, based on the story of Judith and Holofernes from the Apocrypha. The result was the four-reel Judith of Bethulia
(1913), filmed secretly on a 12-square-mile (31-square-km) set in Chatsworth Park, California. In addition to its structurally
complicated narrative, Judith contained massive sets and battle scenes unlike anything yet attempted in American film. It
cost twice the amount Biograph had allocated for its budget. Company officials, stunned at Griffith’s audacity and

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 18/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

extravagance, tried to relieve the director of his creative responsibilities by promoting him to studio production chief.
Griffith quit instead, publishing a full-page advertisement in The New York Dramatic Mirror (December 3, 1913), in which
he took credit for all the Biograph films he had made from The Adventures of Dollie through Judith, as well as for the
narrative innovations they contained. He then accepted an offer from Harry E. Aitken, the president of the recently formed
Mutual Film Corporation, to head the feature production company Reliance-Majestic; he took Bitzer and most of his
Biograph stock company with him.

zoom_in

The Birth of a Nation

As part of his new contract, Griffith was allowed to make two independent features per year, and for his first project he
chose to adapt The Clansman, a novel about the American Civil War and Reconstruction by the Southern clergyman
Thomas Dixon, Jr. (As a Kentuckian whose father had served as a Confederate officer, Griffith was deeply sympathetic to
the material, which was highly sensational in its depiction of Reconstruction as a period in which mulatto carpetbaggers
and their Black henchmen had destroyed the social fabric of the South and given birth to a heroic Ku Klux Klan.) Shooting
on the film began in secrecy in late 1914. Although a script existed, Griffith kept most of the continuity in his head—a
remarkable feat considering that the completed film contained 1,544 separate shots at a time when the most elaborate of
foreign spectacles boasted fewer than 100. When the film opened in March 1915, retitled The Birth of a Nation, it was
immediately pronounced “epoch-making” and recognized as a remarkable artistic achievement. The complexity of its
narrative and the epic sweep of its subject were unprecedented, but so too were its controversial manipulations of audience
response, especially its blatant appeals to racism. Despite its brilliantly conceived battle sequences, its tender domestic
scenes, and its dignified historical reconstructions, the film provoked fear and disgust with its shocking images of
miscegenation and racial violence. As the film’s popularity swept the nation, denunciations followed, and many who had
originally praised it, such as U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson, were forced to recant. Ultimately, after screenings of The Birth of
a Nation had caused riots in several cities, it was banned in eight Northern and Midwestern states. (First Amendment
protection was not extended to motion pictures in the United States until 1952.) Such measures, however, did not prevent

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 19/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

The Birth of a Nation from becoming the single most popular film in history throughout much of the 20th century; it
achieved national distribution in the year of its release and was seen by nearly three million people.

Taking the lead in protesting against The Birth of a Nation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), which had been founded six years prior to the film’s release, used the struggle as an organizing tool. The
powerful impact of Griffith’s film meanwhile persuaded many Black leaders that racial stereotyping in motion pictures
could be more effectively challenged if African American filmmakers produced works more accurately and fairly depicting
Black life. For their first effort, The Birth of a Race (1919), Black sponsors sought collaboration with white producers but
lost control of the project, which was judged a failure. Other aspiring African American filmmakers took note of the film’s
problems and began to make their own works independently. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company (run by George P.
Johnson and Noble Johnson) and the writer and entrepreneur Oscar Micheaux were among those who launched what
became known as the genre of “race pictures,” produced in and for the Black community.

zoom_in

Intolerance

Although it is difficult to believe that the racism of The Birth of a Nation was unconscious, as some have claimed, it is easy
to imagine that Griffith had not anticipated the power of his own images. He seems to have been genuinely stunned by the
hostile public reaction to his masterpiece, and he fought back by publishing a pamphlet entitled The Rise and Fall of Free
Speech in America (1915), which vilified the practice of censorship and especially intolerance. At the height of his notoriety
and fame, Griffith decided to produce a spectacular cinematic polemic against what he saw as a flaw in human character
that had endangered civilization throughout history. The result was the massive epic Intolerance (1916), which interweaves
stories of martyrdom from four separate historical periods. The film was conceived on a scale so monumental that it
dwarfed all its predecessors. Crosscutting freely between a contemporary tale of courtroom injustice, the fall of ancient
Babylon to Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in 16th-century France, and the Crucifixion

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 20/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

of Christ, Griffith created an editing structure so abstract that contemporary audiences could not understand it. Even the
extravagant sets and exciting battle sequences could not save Intolerance at the box office. To reduce his losses, Griffith
withdrew the film from distribution after 22 weeks; he subsequently cut into the negative and released the modern and the
Babylonian stories as two separate features, The Mother and the Law and The Fall of Babylon, in 1919. (Although ignored
by Americans, Intolerance was both popular and vastly influential in the Soviet Union, where filmmakers minutely
analyzed Griffith’s editing style and techniques.)

It would be fair to say that Griffith’s career as an innovator of film form ended with Intolerance, but his career as a film
artist certainly did not. He went on to direct another 26 features between 1916 and 1931, chief among them the World War
I anti-German propaganda epic (financed in part by the British government) Hearts of the World (1918), the subtle and
lyrical Broken Blossoms (1919), and the rousing melodrama Way Down East (1920). The financial success of the latter
made it possible for Griffith to establish his own studio at Mamaroneck, New York, where he produced the epics Orphans
of the Storm (1921) and America (1924), which focused on the French and American revolutions, respectively; both lost
money. Griffith’s next feature was the independent semidocumentary Isn’t Life Wonderful? (1925), which was shot on
location in Germany and is thought to have influenced both the “street” films of the German director G.W. Pabst and the
post-World War II Italian Neorealist movement.

Griffith’s last films, with the exception of The Struggle (1931), were all made for other producers. Not one could be called a
success, although his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln (1930), was recognized as an effective essay in the new medium.
The critical and financial failure of The Struggle, however, a version of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (The Drunkard), forced
Griffith to retire.

It might be said of Griffith that, like Georges Méliès and Edwin S. Porter, he outlived his genius, but that is not true.
Griffith was fundamentally a 19th-century man who became one of the 20th-century’s greatest artists. Transcending
personal defects of vision, judgment, and taste, he developed the narrative language of film. Later filmmakers adapted his
techniques and structures to new themes and styles, while for Griffith his innovations were inextricably linked to a social
vision that became obsolete while he was still in the prime of his working life.

0:12 -13:50

Post-World War I European cinema

Prior to World War I, the American cinema had lagged behind the film industries of Europe, particularly those of France
and Italy, in such matters as feature production and the establishment of permanent theatres. During the war, however,
European film production virtually ceased, in part because the same chemicals used in the production of celluloid were
necessary for the manufacture of gunpowder. The American cinema, meanwhile, experienced a period of unprecedented
prosperity and growth. By the end of the war, it exercised nearly total control of the international market: when the Treaty
of Versailles was signed in 1919, 90 percent of all films screened in Europe, Africa, and Asia were American, and the figure
for South America was (and remained through the 1950s) close to 100 percent. The main exception was Germany, which
had been cut off from American films from 1914 until the end of the war.

Germany

Before World War I, the German motion-picture audience drew broadly from different social classes, and the country was
among the leaders in the construction of film theatres. But German film production lagged behind that of several other
European countries, and Denmark’s film industry in particular played a more prominent role in German film exhibition
than did many domestic companies. This dependence on imported films became a matter of concern among military
leaders during the war, when a flood of effective anti-German propaganda films began to pour into Germany from the
Allied countries. Therefore, on December 18, 1917, the German general Erich Ludendorff ordered the merger of the main
German production, distribution, and exhibition companies into the government-subsidized conglomerate Universum
Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA). UFA’s mission was to upgrade the quality of German films. The organization proved to be
highly effective, and, when the war ended in Germany’s defeat in November 1918, the German film industry was prepared

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 21/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

for the first time to compete in the international marketplace. Transferred to private control, UFA became the single
largest studio in Europe and produced most of the films associated with the “golden age” of German cinema during the
Weimar Republic (1919–33).

zoom_in
keyboard_arrow_right

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

UFA’s first peacetime productions were elaborate costume dramas (Kostümfilme) in the vein of the prewar Italian
superspectacles, and the master of this form was Ernst Lubitsch, who directed such lavish and successful historical
pageants as Madame Du Barry (released in the United States as Passion, 1919), Anna Boleyn (Deception, 1920), and Das
Weib des Pharao (The Loves of Pharaoh, 1921) before immigrating to the United States in 1922. These films earned the
German cinema a foothold in the world market, but it was an Expressionist work, Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919), that brought the industry its first great artistic acclaim. Based on a scenario by the Czech
poet Hans Janowitz and the Austrian writer Carl Mayer, the film recounts a series of brutal murders that are committed in
the north German town of Holstenwall by a somnambulist at the bidding of a demented mountebank, who believes himself
to be the incarnation of a homicidal 18th-century hypnotist named Dr. Caligari. Erich Pommer, Caligari’s producer at
Decla-Bioskop (an independent production company that was to merge with UFA in 1921), added a scene to the original
scenario so that the story appears to be narrated by a madman confined to an asylum of which the mountebank is director
and head psychiatrist. To represent the narrator’s tortured mental state, the director, Robert Wiene, hired three prominent
Expressionist artists—Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig, and Walter Reimann—to design sets that depicted exaggerated
dimensions and deformed spatial relationships. To heighten this architectural stylization (and also to economize on electric
power, which was rationed in postwar Germany), bizarre patterns of light and shadow were painted directly onto the
scenery and even onto the characters’ makeup.

In its effort to embody disturbed psychological states through decor, Caligari influenced enormously the UFA films that
followed it and gave rise to the movement known as German Expressionism. The films of this movement were completely

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 22/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

studio-made and often used distorted sets and lighting effects to create a highly subjective mood. They were primarily films
of fantasy and terror that employed horrific plots to express the theme of the soul in search of itself. Most were
photographed by one of the two great cinematographers of the Weimar period, Karl Freund and Fritz Arno Wagner.
Representative works included F.W. Murnau’s Der Januskopf (Janus-Faced, 1920), adapted from Robert Louis
Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s Der Golem (The Golem, 1920),
adapted from a Jewish legend in which a gigantic clay statue becomes a raging monster; Arthur Robison’s Schatten
(Warning Shadows, 1922); Wiene’s Raskolnikow (1923), based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Paul
Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924); and Henrik Galeen’s Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague,
1926), which combines the Faust legend with a doppelgänger, or double, motif. In addition to winning international
prestige for German films, Expressionism produced two directors who would become major figures in world cinema, Fritz
Lang and F.W. Murnau.

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 23/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

zoom_in
keyboard_arrow_right

Metropolis

Lang had already directed several successful serials, including Die Spinnen (The Spiders, 1919–20), when he collaborated
with his future wife, the scriptwriter Thea von Harbou, to produce Der müde Tod (Destiny, 1921) for Decla-Bioskop. This
episodic Romantic allegory of doomed lovers, set in several different historical periods, earned Lang acclaim for his
dynamic compositions of architectural line and space. Lang’s use of striking, stylized images is also demonstrated in the
other films of his Expressionist period, notably the crime melodrama Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler,
1922), the Wagnerian diptych Siegfried (1922–24) and Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge, 1922–23), and the

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 24/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

stunningly futuristic Metropolis (1926), perhaps the greatest science-fiction film ever made. After directing the early sound
masterpiece M (1931), based on child murders in Düsseldorf, Lang became increasingly estranged from German political
life. He emigrated in 1933 to escape the Nazis and began a second career in the Hollywood studios the following year.

Murnau made several minor Expressionist films before directing one of the movement’s classics, an (unauthorized)
adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula entitled Nosferatu—eine Symphonie des Grauens (“Nosferatu, a Symphony of
Horror,” 1922), but it was Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), a film in the genre of Kammerspiel (“intimate
theatre”), that made him world-famous. Scripted by Carl Mayer and produced by Erich Pommer for UFA, Der letzte Mann
told the story of a hotel doorman who is humiliated by the loss of his job and—more important, apparently, in postwar
German society—of his splendid paramilitary uniform. Murnau and Karl Freund, his cameraman, gave this simple tale a
complex narrative structure through their innovative use of camera movement and subjective point-of-view shots. In one
famous example, Freund strapped a lightweight camera to his chest and stumbled drunkenly around the set of a bedroom
to record the inebriated porter’s point of view. In the absence of modern cranes and dollies, at various points in the filming
Murnau and Freund placed the camera on moving bicycles, fire engine ladders, and overhead cables in order to achieve
smooth, sustained movement. The total effect was a tapestry of subjectively involving movement and intense identification
with the narrative. Even more remarkably, the film conveyed its meaning without using any printed intertitles for dialogue
or explanation.

Der letzte Mann was universally hailed as a masterpiece and probably had more influence on Hollywood style than any
other single foreign film in history. Its “unchained camera” technique (Mayer’s phrase) spawned many imitations in
Germany and elsewhere, the most significant being E.A. Dupont’s circus-tent melodrama Variété (1925). The film also
brought Murnau a long-term Hollywood contract, which he began to fulfill in 1927 after completing two last
“superproductions,” Tartüff (Tartuffe, 1925) and Faust (1926), for UFA.

In 1924 the German mark was stabilized by the so-called Dawes Plan, which financed the long-term payment of Germany’s
war-reparations debt and curtailed all exports. This created an artificial prosperity in the economy at large, which lasted
only until the stock market crash of 1929, but it was devastating to the film industry, the bulk of whose revenues came from
foreign markets. Hollywood then seized the opportunity to cripple its only serious European rival, saturating Germany
with American films and buying its independent theatre chains. As a result of these forays and its own internal
mismanagement, UFA stood on the brink of bankruptcy by the end of 1925. It was saved by a $4 million loan offered by
two major American studios, Famous Players–Lasky (later Paramount) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in exchange for
collaborative rights to UFA studios, theatres, and creative personnel. This arrangement resulted in the founding of the
Parufamet (Paramount-UFA-Metro) Distribution Company in early 1926 and the almost immediate emigration of UFA
film artists and technicians to Hollywood, where they worked for a variety of studios. This first Germanic migration was
temporary. Many of the filmmakers went back to UFA disgusted at the assembly-line character of the American studio
system, but many—such as Lubitsch, Freund, and Murnau—stayed on to launch full-fledged Hollywood careers, and many
more would return during the 1930s to escape the Nazi regime.

In the meantime, the new sensibility that had entered German intellectual life turned away from the morbid psychological
themes of Expressionism toward an acceptance of “life as it is lived.” Called die neue Sachlichkeit (“the new objectivity”),
this spirit stemmed from the economic dislocations that beset German society in the wake of the war, particularly the
impoverishment of the middle classes through raging inflation. In cinema, die neue Sachlichkeit translated into the grim
social realism of the “street” films of the late 1920s, including G.W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925),
Bruno Rahn’s Dirnentragödie (Tragedy of the Streets, 1927), Joe May’s Asphalt (1929), and Piel Jutzi’s Berlin-
Alexanderplatz (1931). Named for their prototype, Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (The Street, 1923), these films focused on the
disillusionment, cynicism, and ultimate resignation of ordinary German people whose lives were crippled during the
postwar inflation.

The master of the form was G.W. Pabst, whose work established conventions of continuity editing that would become
essential to the sound film. In such important realist films as Die freudlose Gasse, Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of
Jeanne Ney, 1927), Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929), and Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost
Girl, 1929), Pabst created complex continuity sequences, using techniques that became key features of Hollywood’s
“invisible” editing style, such as cutting on action, cutting from a shot of a character’s glance to one of what the character

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 25/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

sees (motivated point-of-view shots), and cutting to a reverse angle shot (one in which the camera angle has changed 180
degrees; e.g., in a scene in which a man and a woman face one another in conversation, the man is seen from the woman’s
point of view, and then the woman is shown from the man’s point of view). Pabst later became an important figure of the
early sound period, contributing two significant works in his pacifist films Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft
(“Comradeship,” 1931). Emigrating from Germany after the Nazis seized power in 1933, Pabst worked in France and briefly
in Hollywood. He returned to Germany in 1941 and made several films for the Nazi-controlled film industry during World
War II.

By March 1927, UFA was once again facing financial collapse, and it turned this time to the Prussian financier Alfred
Hugenberg, a director of the powerful Krupp industrial empire and a leader of the right-wing German National Party who
was sympathetic to the Nazis. Hugenberg bought out the American interests in UFA, acquiring a majority of the company’s
stock and directing the remainder into the hands of his political allies. As chairman of the UFA board, he quietly instituted
a nationalistic production policy that gave increasing prominence to those allies and their cause and that enabled the Nazis
to subvert the German film industry when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. German cinema then fell under the
authority of Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. For the next 12 years every film
made in the Third Reich had to be personally approved for release by Goebbels. Jews were officially banned from the
industry, which caused a vast wave of German film artists to leave for Hollywood. Los Angeles became known as “the new
Weimar,” and the German cinema was emptied of the talent and brilliance that had created its golden age.

Listen to article 19 minutes

The Soviet Union

During the decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, the history of cinema in pre-Soviet Russia was a neglected subject, if
not actively suppressed. In subsequent years, scholars have brought to light and reevaluated a small but vigorous film
culture in the pre-World War I era. Some 4,000 motion-picture theatres were in operation, with the French company
Pathé playing a substantial role in production and distribution. Meanwhile, Russian filmmakers such as Yevgeny Bauer
had developed a sophisticated style marked by artful lighting and decor.

When Russia entered World War I in August 1914, foreign films could no longer be imported, and the tsarist government
established the Skobelev Committee to stimulate domestic production and produce propaganda in support of the regime.
The committee had little immediate effect, but, when the tsar fell in March 1917, the Provisional Government, headed by
Aleksandr Kerensky, reorganized it to produce antitsarist propaganda. When the Bolsheviks inherited the committee eight
months later, they transformed it into the Cinema Committee of the People’s Commissariat of Education.

A minority party with approximately 200,000 members, the Bolsheviks had assumed the leadership of 160 million people
who were scattered across the largest continuous landmass in the world, spoke more than 100 separate languages, and
were mostly illiterate. Vladimir Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders looked on the motion-picture medium as a means of
unifying the huge, disparate nation. Lenin was the first political leader of the 20th century to recognize both the
importance of film as propaganda and its power to communicate quickly and effectively. He understood that audiences did
not require literacy to comprehend a film’s meaning and that more people could be reached through mass-distributed
motion pictures than through any other medium of the time. Lenin declared: “The cinema is for us the most important of
the arts,” and his government gave top priority to the rapid development of the Soviet film industry, which was
nationalized in August 1919 and put under the direct authority of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

There was, however, little to build upon. Most of the prerevolutionary producers had fled to Europe, wrecking their studios
as they left and taking their equipment and film stock with them. A foreign blockade prevented the importation of new
equipment or stock (there were no domestic facilities for manufacturing either), and massive power shortages restricted
the use of what limited resources remained. The Cinema Committee was not deterred, however; its first act was to found a
professional film school in Moscow to train directors, technicians, and actors for the cinema.

The Vsesoyuznyi Gosudarstvenyi Institut Kinematografii (VGIK; “All-Union State Institute of Cinematography”) was the
first such school in the world. Initially it trained people in the production of agitki, existing newsreels reedited for the
https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 26/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

purpose of agitation and propaganda (agitprop). The agitki were transported on specially equipped agit-trains and agit-
steamers to the provinces, where they were exhibited to generate support for the Revolution. (The state-controlled Cuban
cinema used the same tactic after the revolution of 1959.) In fact, during the abysmal years of the Russian Civil War (1918–
20), nearly all Soviet films were agitki of some sort. Most of the great directors of the Soviet silent cinema were trained in
that form, although, having very little technical equipment and no negative film stock, they were often required to make
“films without celluloid.”

Students at the VGIK were instructed to write, direct, and act out scenarios as if they were before cameras. Then—on paper
—they assembled various “shots” into completed “films.” The great teacher Lev Kuleshov obtained a print of Griffith’s
Intolerance and screened it for students in his “Kuleshov workshop” until they had memorized its shot structures and
could rearrange its multilayered editing sequences on paper in hundreds of different combinations.

Kuleshov further experimented with editing by intercutting the same shot of a famous actor’s expressionless face with
several different shots of highly expressive content—a steaming bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin, and a little girl
playing with a teddy bear. The invariable response of film school audiences when shown these sequences was that the
actor’s face assumed the emotion appropriate to the intercut object—hunger for the soup, sorrow for the dead woman,
paternal affection for the little girl. Kuleshov reasoned from this phenomenon, known today as the “Kuleshov effect,” that
the shot in film always has two values: the one it carries in itself as a photographic image of reality and the one it acquires
when placed into juxtaposition with another shot. He reasoned further that the second value is more important to
cinematic signification than the first and that time and space in the cinema must therefore be subordinate to the process of
editing, or “montage” (coined by the Soviets from the French verb monter, “to assemble”). Kuleshov ultimately conceived
of montage as an expressive process whereby dissimilar images could be linked together to create nonliteral or symbolic
meaning.

Although Kuleshov made several important films, including Po zakonu (By the Law, 1926), it was as a teacher and theorist
that he most deeply influenced an entire generation of Soviet directors. Two of his most brilliant students were Sergei
Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 27/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

zoom_in

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 28/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

Sergei Eisenstein

Eisenstein was, with Griffith, one of the great pioneering geniuses of the modern cinema, and like his predecessor he
produced a handful of enduring masterworks. Griffith, however, had elaborated the structure of narrative editing
intuitively, whereas Eisenstein was an intellectual who formulated a modernist theory of editing based on the psychology
of perception and Marxist dialectic. He was trained as a civil engineer, but in 1920 he joined the Moscow Proletkult
Theatre, where he fell under the influence of the stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold and directed a number of plays in the
revolutionary style of Futurism. In the winter of 1922–23 Eisenstein studied under Kuleshov and was inspired to write his
first theoretical manifesto, “The Montage of Attractions.” Published in the radical journal Lef, the article advocated
assaulting an audience with calculated emotional shocks for the purpose of agitation.

zoom_in

Strike

Eisenstein was invited to direct the Proletkult-sponsored film Stachka (Strike) in 1924, but, like Griffith, he knew little of
the practical aspects of production. He therefore enlisted the aid of Eduard Tisse, a brilliant cinematographer at the state-
owned Goskino studios, beginning a lifelong artistic collaboration. Strike is a semidocumentary representation of the
brutal suppression of a strike by tsarist factory owners and police. In addition to being Eisenstein’s first film, it was also the
first revolutionary mass-film of the new Soviet state. Conceived as an extended montage of shock stimuli, the film
concludes with the now famous sequence in which the massacre of the strikers and their families is intercut with shots of
cattle being slaughtered in an abattoir.

Strike was an immediate success, and Eisenstein was next commissioned to direct a film celebrating the 20th anniversary
of the failed 1905 Revolution against tsarism. Originally intended to provide a panorama of the entire event, the project
eventually came to focus on a single representative episode—the mutiny of the battleship Potemkin and the massacre of the
citizens of the port of Odessa by tsarist troops. Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925) emerged as one of the
most important and influential films ever made, especially in Eisenstein’s use of montage, which had improved far beyond
the formulaic, if effective, juxtapositions of Strike.

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 29/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

zoom_in

Battleship Potemkin

Although agitational to the core, Battleship Potemkin is a work of extraordinary pictorial beauty and great elegance of
form. It is symmetrically broken into five movements or acts, according to the structure of Greek tragedy. In the first of
these, “Men and Maggots,” the flagrant mistreatment of the sailors at the hands of their officers is demonstrated, while the
second, “Drama on the Quarterdeck,” presents the actual mutiny and the ship’s arrival in Odessa. “Appeal from the Dead”
establishes the solidarity of the citizens of Odessa with the mutineers, but it is the fourth sequence, “The Odessa Steps,”
which depicts the massacre of the citizens, that thrust Eisenstein and his film into the historical eminence that both occupy
today. Its power is such that the film’s conclusion, “Meeting the Squadron,” in which the Battleship Potemkin in a show of
brotherhood is allowed to pass through the squadron unharmed, is anticlimactic.

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 30/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

zoom_in

Battleship Potemkin

Unquestionably the most famous sequence of its kind in film history, “The Odessa Steps” incarnates the theory of
dialectical montage that Eisenstein later expounded in his collected writings, The Film Sense (1942) and Film Form (1949).
Eisenstein believed that meaning in motion pictures is generated by the collision of opposing shots. Building on Kuleshov’s
ideas, Eisenstein reasoned that montage operates according to the Marxist view of history as a perpetual conflict in which a
force (thesis) and a counterforce (antithesis) collide to produce a totally new and greater phenomenon (synthesis). He
compared this dialectical process in film editing to “the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving
forward its automobile or tractor.” The force of “The Odessa Steps” arises when the viewer’s mind combines individual,
independent shots and forms a new, distinct conceptual impression that far outweighs the shots’ narrative significance.
Through Eisenstein’s accelerated manipulations of filmic time and space, the slaughter on the stone steps—where
hundreds of citizens find themselves trapped between descending tsarist militia above and Cossacks below—acquires a
powerful symbolic meaning. With the addition of a stirring revolutionary score by the German Marxist composer Edmund
Meisel, the agitational appeal of Battleship Potemkin became nearly irresistible, and, when exported in early 1926, it made
Eisenstein world-famous.

Eisenstein’s next project, Oktyabr (October, 1928), was commissioned by the Central Committee to commemorate the 10th
anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Accordingly, vast resources, including the Soviet army and navy, were placed at
the director’s disposal. Eisenstein based the shooting script on voluminous documentary material from the era and on
John Reed’s book Ten Days That Shook the World. When the film was completed in November 1927, it was just under four
hours long. While Eisenstein was making October, however, Joseph Stalin had taken control of the Politburo from Leon
Trotsky, and the director was forced to cut the print by one-third to eliminate references to the exiled Trotsky.

Eisenstein had consciously used October as a laboratory for experimenting with “intellectual” or “ideological” montage, an
abstract type of editing in which the relationships established between shots are conceptual rather than visual or
emotional. When the film was finally released, however, Stalinist critics attacked this alleged “formalist excess”
(aestheticism or elitism). The same charge was leveled even more bitterly against Eisenstein’s next film, Staroe i novoe
(Old and New 1929), which Stalinist bureaucrats completely disavowed. Stalin hated Eisenstein because he was an
intellectual and a Jew, but the director’s international stature was such that he could not be publicly purged. Instead, Stalin

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 31/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

used the Soviet state-subsidy apparatus to foil Eisenstein’s projects and attack his principles at every turn, a situation that
resulted in the director’s failure to complete another film until Alexander Nevsky was commissioned in 1938.

Eisenstein’s nearest rival in the Soviet silent cinema was his fellow student Vsevolod Pudovkin. Like Eisenstein, Pudovkin
developed a new theory of montage, but one based on cognitive linkage rather than dialectical collision. He maintained
that “the film is not shot, but built, built up from the separate strips of celluloid that are its raw material.” Pudovkin, like
Griffith, most often used montage for narrative rather than symbolic purpose. His films are more personal than
Eisenstein’s; the epic drama that is the focus of Eisenstein’s films exists in Pudovkin’s films merely to provide a backdrop
for the interplay of human emotions.

Pudovkin’s major work is Mat (Mother, 1926), a tale of strikebreaking and terrorism in which a woman loses first her
husband and then her son to the opposing sides of the 1905 Revolution. The film was internationally acclaimed for the
innovative intensity of its montage, as well as for its emotion and lyricism. Pudovkin’s later films included Konets Sankt-
Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg, 1927), which, like Eisenstein’s October, was commissioned to celebrate the 10th
anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Potomok Chingis-Khana (The Heir to Genghis Khan, or Storm over Asia,
1928), which is set in Central Asia during the Russian Civil War. Both mingle human drama with the epic and the symbolic
as they tell a story of a politically naive person who is galvanized into action by tsarist tyranny. Although Pudovkin was
never persecuted as severely by the Stalinists as Eisenstein, he too was publicly charged with formalism for his
experimental sound film Prostoi sluchai (A Simple Case, 1932), which he was forced to release without its sound track.
Pudovkin made several more sound films but remains best known for his silent work.

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 32/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

zoom_in

Aleksandr Dovzhenko

Two other seminal figures of the Soviet silent era were Aleksandr Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov (original name Denis
Kaufman). Dovzhenko, the son of Ukrainian peasants, had been a political cartoonist and painter before becoming a
director at the state-controlled Odessa studios in 1926. After several minor works, he made Zvenigora (1928), a collection
of boldly stylized tales about a hunt for an ancient Scythian treasure set during four different stages of Ukrainian history;
Arsenal (1929), an epic film poem about the effects of revolution and civil war upon the Ukraine; and Zemlya (Earth,
1930), which is considered to be his masterpiece. Earth tells the story of the conflict between a family of wealthy

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 33/34
5/15/23, 12:46 PM History of film - D.W. Griffith, Editing Techniques, and Race Pictures | Britannica

landowning peasants (kulaks) and the young peasants of a collective farm in a small Ukrainian village, but the film is less a
narrative than a lyric hymn to the cyclic recurrence of birth, life, love, and death in nature and in humankind. Although the
film is acclaimed today, when it was released, Stalinist critics denounced it as counterrevolutionary. Soon after, Dovzhenko
entered a period of political eclipse, during which, however, he continued to make films.

Dziga Vertov (a pseudonym meaning “spinning top”) was an artist of quite different talents. He began his career as an
agitki photographer and newsreel editor and is now acknowledged as the father of cinema verité (a self-consciously
realistic documentary movement of the 1960s and ’70s) for his development and practice of the theory of the kino-glaz
(“cinema-eye”). Vertov articulated this doctrine in the early 1920s in a number of radical manifestos in which he
denounced conventional narrative cinema as impotent and demanded that it be replaced with a cinema of actuality based
on the “organization of camera-recorded documentary material.” Between 1922 and 1925, he put his idea into practice in a
series of 23 carefully crafted newsreel-documentaries entitled Kino-pravda (“film truth”) and Goskinokalender. Vertov’s
most famous film is Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), a feature-length portrait of Moscow
from dawn to dusk. The film plays upon the “city symphony” genre inaugurated by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, the
Symphony of a Great City (1927), but Vertov repeatedly draws attention to the filmmaking process to create an
autocritique of cinema itself.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Vertov welcomed the coming of sound, envisioning it as a “radio-ear” to accompany the
“cinema-eye.” His first sound film, Entuziazm—simfoniya Donbassa (Symphony of the Donbas, 1931), was an
extraordinary contribution to the new medium, as was Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs About Lenin, 1934), yet Vertov
could not escape the charge of formalist error any more than his peers. Although he did make the feature film Kolybelnaya
(Lullaby) in 1937, for the most part the Stalinist establishment reduced him to the status of a newsreel photographer after
1934.

Many other Soviet filmmakers played important roles in the great decade of experiment that followed the Revolution,
among them Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, Boris Barnet, Yakov Protazanov, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Abram
Room, and the documentarian Esther Shub. The period came to an abrupt end in 1929, when Stalin removed the state film
trust (then called Sovkino) from the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Education and placed it under the direct authority
of the Supreme Council of the National Economy. Reorganized as Soyuzkino, the trust was turned over to the reactionary
bureaucrat Boris Shumyatsky, a proponent of the narrowly ideological doctrine known as Socialist Realism. This policy,
which came to dominate the Soviet arts, dictated that individual creativity be subordinated to the political aims of the party
and the state. In practice, it militated against the symbolic, the experimental, and the avant-garde in favour of a literal-
minded “people’s art” that glorified representative Soviet heroes and idealized Soviet experience. The restraints imposed
made it impossible for the great filmmakers of the postrevolutionary era to produce creative or innovative work, and the
Soviet cinema went into decline.

Load Next Page

keyboard_arrow_down

https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/D-W-Griffith 34/34