Inventors and producers had tried from the very beginnings of moving pictures to marry the image with synchronous sound, but no practical method was devised until the late 1920s. Thus, for the first thirty years of their history, movies were more or less silent, although accompanied by live musicians and sometimes sound effects, and with dialogue and narration presented in intertitles.
Early developments in technique, form and business
Paris stage magician Georges Méliès began shooting and exhibiting films in 1896. His stock-in-trade became films of fantasy and the bizarre, including A Trip to the Moon (1902), possibly the first movie to portray space travel. He pioneered many of the fundamental special effects techniques used in movies for most of the twentieth century, demonstrating that film had unprecedented power to distort visible reality rather than just faithfully recording it (Cook, 1990). He also led the way in making multi-scene narratives as long as fifteen minutes.
Edwin S. Porter, Edison’s leading director in these years, pushed forward the sophistication of film editing in works like Life of an American Fireman and the first movie Western, The Great Train Robbery (both 1903). Porter arguably discovered that the basic unit of structure in a film is the shot, rather than the scene (the basic unit of structure in a play).
These helped establish the medium as more than a fad and encouraged the increase of nickelodeons, the first permanent movie theaters (”The oldest cinema in the world still in operation today is the Pionier Cinema which opened as the Helios on the 26 September 1909 in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland)” – Guinness World Records). There were 10,000 in the U.S. alone by 1908 (Cook, 1990). The previously anarchic industry increasingly became major business, which encouraged consolidation. The French Pathé Frères company achieved a dominant position worldwide through methods like control of key patents and ownership of theaters. In the U.S., Edison led the creation of the Motion Picture Patents Company, which achieved a brief, virtual monopoly there, using not just aggressive business tactics but sometimes violent intimidation against independent competitors (Parkinson, 1995).
Rise of the feature film and film as art
The standard length of a film remained one reel, or about ten to fifteen minutes, through the first decade of the century, partly based on producers’ assumptions about the attention spans of their still largely working class audiences.
The Australian film The Story of the Kelly Gang (also screened as Ned Kelly and His Gang) is widely regarded as the world’s first “feature length” film. Its 80 minute running time was unprecedented when it was released in 1906. In 1906 Dan Barry and Charles Tait of Melbourne produced and directed ‘The Story of the Kelly Gang.’ It wasn’t until 1911 that countries other than Australia began to make feature films. By this time 16 full length feature films had been made in Australia.
Soon Europe created multiple-reel period extravaganzas that were even longer. With international box office successes like Queen Elizabeth (France, 1912), Quo Vadis? (Italy, 1913) and Cabiria (Italy, 1914), the feature film began to replace the short as the cinema’s central form.
Leading this trend in America was director D.W. Griffith with his historical epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Unprecedented in scale, they also did much to fix the developing codes of editing and visual storytelling that remain the foundation of mainstream film grammar. The former film was also notable as perhaps the first to inspire widespread racial controversy.
Along with a boom in high-toned literary adaptations, these trends began to make the movies a respectable diversion for the middle class and gain them recognition as a genuine art form with a secure place in the emerging culture of the twentieth century.
In France brothers Lafitte in 1907. created so-called Films d’art. They were supposed to draw the higher classes of society into movie theaters. The more educated classes thought that film was just for uneducated people and preferred traditional theater. Films d’art were theater plays shot with camera and played in movie theaters. People didn’t like them and the ‘experiment’ showed that film has its own expressive language different from theater.
Hollywood triumphant
Until this point, the cinemas of France and Italy had been the most globally popular and powerful. But the United States was already gaining quickly when World War I (1914-1918) caused a devastating interruption in the European film industries. The American industry, or “Hollywood,” as it was becoming known after its new geographical center in California, gained the position it has held, more or less, ever since: movie factory for the world, exporting its product to most countries on earth and controlling the market in many of them.
By the 1920s, the U.S. reached what is still its era of greatest-ever output, producing an average of 800 feature films annually [1], or 82% of the global total (Eyman, 1997). The comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the swashbuckling adventures of Douglas Fairbanks and the romances of Clara Bow, to cite just a few examples, made these performers’ faces well-known on every continent. The Western visual norm that would become classical continuity editing was developed and exported - although its adoption was slower in some non-Western countries without strong realist traditions in art and drama, such as Japan.
This development was contemporary with the growth of the studio system and its greatest publicity method, the star system, which characterized American film for decades to come and provided models for other movie industries. The studios’ efficient, top-down control over all stages of their product enabled a new and ever-growing level of lavish production and technical sophistication. At the same time, the system’s commercial regimentation and focus on glamorous escapism discouraged daring and ambition beyond a certain degree, a prime example being the brief but still legendary directing career of the iconoclastic Erich von Stroheim in the late teens and the ‘20s.
World film at the peak of the silents
But even now, the dominance of mainstream Hollywood entertainment wasn’t as strong as it would be, and alternatives were still widely seen and influential.
In 1915, after a ban was ended on foreign imports in France the early Hollywood fare inspired the birth of the cinematic avant-garde. A group of filmmakers began experimenting with optical and pictorial effects as well as rhythmic editing. The trend became known as French Impressionist Cinema.
Germany was America’s strongest competitor. Its most distinctive contribution was the dark, hallucinatory worlds of German Expressionism, which advanced the power of anti-realistic presentation to put internal states of mind onscreen, as well as strongly influenced the emerging horror genre.
The newborn Soviet cinema was the most radically innovative. There, the craft of editing, especially, surged forward, going beyond its previous role in advancing a story. Sergei Eisenstein perfected the technique of so-called dialectical or intellectual montage, which strove to make non-linear, often violently clashing, images express ideas and provoke emotional and intellectual reactions in the viewer.
Meanwhile, the first feature-length silent film was made in India by Dadasaheb Phalke, considered to be the Father of Indian Cinema. The film was the period piece Raja Harishchandra (1913), and it laid the foundation for a series of period films. By the next decade the output of Indian Cinema was an average of 27 films per year.
The cultural avant gardes of a number of countries worked with experimental films, mostly shorts, that completely abandoned linear narrative and embraced abstraction, pure aestheticism and the irrational subconscious, most famously in the early work of Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel. In some ways, in fact, this decade marked the first serious split between mainstream, “popular” film and “art” film.
But even within the mainstream, refinement was rapid, bringing silent film to what would turn out to be its aesthetic summit. The possibilities of cinematography kept increasing as cameras became more mobile (thanks to new booms and dollies) and film stocks more sensitive and versatile. Screen acting became more of a craft, without its earlier theatrical exaggeration and achieving greater subtlety and psychological realism. As visual eloquence increased, reliance on intertitles decreased; the occasional film, such as F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Germany, 1926) even eschewed them altogether. Paradoxically, at about this time, the silent cinema period ended.
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