BLOG ARTICLE ON THE HISTORY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS

                        BLOG ARTICLE ON THE HISTORY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS:

The Evolution of Documentary Filmmaking:

    During the U.S. involvement in World War II, the Hollywood film industry cooperated closely with the government to support its war-aims information campaign. In the last years of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st, the idea of “synergy” dominated the motion-picture industry in the United States, and an unprecedented wave of mergers and acquisitions pursued this ultimately elusive concept. Simply put, synergy implied that consolidating related media and entertainment properties under a single umbrella could strengthen every facet of a coordinated communications empire. Motion pictures, broadcast television, cable and satellite systems, radio networks, theme parks, newspapers and magazines, book publishers, manufacturers of home entertainment products, sports teams, Internet service providers these were among the different elements that came together in various corporate combinations under the notion that each would boost the others. News Corporation Ltd., originally an Australian media company, started the trend by acquiring Twentieth Century–Fox in 1985. The Japanese manufacturing giant Sony Corporation acquired Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc., from The Coca-Cola Company in 1989. Following the declaration of war on Japan, the government created a Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs to coordinate the production of entertainment features with patriotic, morale-boosting themes and messages about the “American way of life,” the nature of the enemy and the allies, civilian responsibility on the home front, and the fighting forces themselves. 


    Several Hollywood directors produced documentaries for government and military agencies. Among the best-known of these films, which were designed to explain the war to both servicemen and civilians, are Frank Capra’s seven-part series Why We Fight (1942–44), John Ford’s The Battle of Midway (1942), William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle (1944), and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro (1944). The Documentary Film Nanook of the North, Directed by Robert J. Flaherty about an expedition to the North of America and Canada. In June 1920, Flaherty made the trip (with 75,000 feet of film) to start shooting his film which gradually became a trailblazing ethnographic documentary, chronicling the everyday lives of Eskimos. The camera weighed around 60 pounds and the tripod was 15 pounds. All this Flaherty’s crew took across the frozen landscapes and floes. The year-long expedition was supposedly funded by fur trapper Thierry Mallet. Flaherty first shot the walrus hunt sequence and screened the footage to the Inuit in a makeshift lab. He describes that the fame of the footage spread throughout the Inuit country, and consequently the locals started actively participating in his project.  One Director was on the opposite side, which was Between 1922 and 1925, a total of 23 issues of Dziga Vertov's newsreel series Kino-Pravda (Kino-Truth) appeared albeit irregularly and in very few copies. Vertov's goal was to create a kind of screen newspaper; the title is a tribute to the newspaper Pravda founded by Lenin. Just like the Kinonedelja newsreel series (1918–19), the Kino-Pravda issues offer a fascinating insight into the early Soviet Union and demonstrate the rapid development of Vertov's film language. 

    The 22 surviving issues (No. 12 is lost) have been digitized and subtitled in German and English by the Austrian Film Museum in 2017/18 and are now available online. By the 1930’s the use of filmmaking for the intent of propaganda had become well known. For example, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in Battleship Potemkin. The film’s first image, of waves slamming into a breakwater, it’s clear that Eisenstein is interested not only the power of unity, but the way in which such united clusters move. It’s this careful rendering, of surging crowds and marching troops, that makes these scenarios so unceasingly fascinating. The serpentine line that advances toward Vakulinchuk’s body. The groups of sailors that scale the crow’s nest in the tense climax, their necks craning like gophers. The way the crowd surges to consume an anti-Semite, fulfilling the perfect dream of a spotless socialism and enforcing the feeling of a living, breathing entity. It’s because of these types of images that, despite its inextricable relationship to agitprop, Battleship Potemkin can be imagined in other contexts, allied with the observant slant of nature films or Dziga Vertov’s anthropology exercises. It’s what separates it from something like The Birth of a Nation, whose mixture of overbearing rhetoric and groundbreaking technical mastery makes it feel like a museum piece.  When the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930’s, they intended to use filmmaking to further their cause as well, one of the stars of Germain Film industry at that time was Leni Riefenstahl, she had started her career as an actress then transitioned into directing in documentary filmmaking by the time the Nazis had come to power. 

    Her first feature film Blaue Licht caught the attention of Adolf Hitler's and soon to become notorious as Hitler's favorite director, made her directorial debut with this vivid and beautiful film. It tells the tale of a mysterious blue light on top of a mountain that lures young men to their deaths. the photography is so sublime that it doesn't matter. Black and White has seldom looked so beautiful and the use of light is magnificent. Riefenstahl certainly knew how to film and light faces including her own, a talent that would later enhance her propaganda films for the Nazis. This film is more than an historical curiosity - it is quite a work of art. By the 1950’s, there where multiples movement and documentary filmmaking as technology was slowly yet allowing more people to have access to audio and visual equipment, meaning there were able to document everyday life and create documentaries of their own. One specific movement in 1950 Britain was Free Cinema because these films were not controlled by any major studios.  One movement that was very close was Cinema Verité, this movement was born in late 1960’s France, where the technology was available to create portable cameras and sound equipment, this made filming in real world condition possible for non-studio back to independent filmmakers. The goal of Cinema Verité was to simply put the camera in the room and watch real life take place. Hopping that eventually the people involve in being filmed will forget that the camera was there in sharing what is a privilege moment and simply as if real life was taking place, excessive editing was required ratio to 1/100. The American equivalent to the Cinema Verité movement will be Direct Cinema started by the Drew Associates.

     The film industry believed that the greatest threat to its continued success was posed by television, especially considering the Paramount decrees. The studios seemed to be losing their control of the nation’s theatres while exhibitors were losing their audiences to television. The studios therefore attempted to diminish television’s appeal by exploiting the two obvious advantages that film enjoyed over the new medium the size of its images and, at a time when all television broadcasting was in black and white, the ability to produce photographic color. By 1954 more than 50 percent of American features were made in color, and the figure reached 94 percent by 1970. Like the coming of sound, the conversion to wide-screen formats produced an initial regression as filmmakers learned how to compose and edit their images for the new elongated frame. Sound had promoted the rise of aurally intensive genres such as the musical and the gangster film, and the wide-screen format similarly created a bias in favor of visually spectacular subjects and epic scale. The emergence of the three- to four-hour wide-screen “blockbuster” in such films as War and Peace, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Ten Commandments in 1956 coincided with the era’s affinity for safe and sanitized material. Given the political paranoia of the times, few subjects could be treated seriously, and the studios concentrated on presenting traditional genre fare westerns, musicals, comedies, and blockbusters suitable for wide-screen treatment. Only a director like Hitchcock, whose style was oblique and imagist, could prosper in such a climate. He produced his greatest work during the period, much of it in VistaVision (Rear Window, 1954; The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956; Vertigo, 1958; North by Northwest, 1959; Psycho, 1960; The Birds, 1963). 

Written and Directed by:
Abdoulaye Diallo
Creator Name:
King Ollaid

SOURCES & REFERENCES:
Robert Sklar: Professor of Cinema Studies, New York University. Author of Film: An International History of the Medium and others. https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/European-cinema
https://www.classichollywoodcentral.com/background/the-studio-system/
DouglasGomery:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/798092.The_Hollywood_Studio_System.



Location: Michigan, USA

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