1 (page 6)p. 6The three ages of silent film

In 1923, comedian Buster Keaton released Three Ages, his first feature film as codirector and star. Conceived as a parody of D. W. Griffith’s 1916 epic Intolerance, which cut across three wildly different timelines—ancient Babylon, Renaissance France, and the United States of the Progressive Era—to explore “love’s struggle throughout the ages,” Keaton’s Three Ages applied the same time-skipping structure to deliberately less-than-epic effect. Equally hapless as a caveman, an ancient Roman, and a modern man about town, Keaton’s character struggles to win the heart of his love interest, no matter what the epoch. Part of the joke is just how little the story changes even as the centuries pass: whether he is contending against dinosaurs, chariot races, or automobiles, Keaton is consistently stymied. Yet the decision to cut the film’s narrative in three was also a shrewd business move. Keaton had until that point starred only in shorts and did not yet know whether he would be successful in a longer picture. If the film flopped, he could easily cut it into three and release each part as a separate comic short. The three films within the film were thus connected and also entirely separate from one another.

Keaton’s ingenious narrative structure offers a helpful framework for understanding the history of silent film. Although it is common to speak of the silent era as though it were a unified period, this is far from true. For film historians, the silent era is (page 7)p. 7composed of at least three separate periods, each with its own filmmaking norms and unique industrial structures. Roughly speaking, they consist of the periods of early cinema, running from the invention of motion picture recording and projection technology around 1895 to the middle of the next decade, when film was primarily a technological attraction; a transitional period encompassing the later aughts and much of the 1910s, when filmmakers started to experiment with new narrative techniques and the modern studio first emerged; and the classical period that began toward the end of the First World War, when earlier formal experiments were consolidated into the classical style of filmmaking promoted by the ascendant Hollywood studios.

Even this subdivision is a simplification; some scholars divide the silent era even further and there are ongoing disagreements regarding the dating of major transitions. But Keaton’s framework of three ages offers a useful way to begin to understand these complexities. Each of these ages is part of the same overarching story: that of filmmakers’ ongoing attempts to harness the motion picture camera as a tool of entertainment and of art in the absence of synchronized sound. And each age is also severable from the others, marked by its own creative goals and industrial conditions. Together they tell the story of silent film writ large, but each one has its own discrete storyline. The story of silent film is ultimately not one story, but three.

The history of cinema begins with an invention repeated three times. In 1895, the German brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky appeared at Berlin’s Wintergarten Theatre to demonstrate their new Bioscop, a machine capable of projecting moving pictures. One month later, another pair of brothers, Louis and Auguste Lumière in France, demonstrated their competing device, the Cinématographe, at a screening at the Grand Café in Paris. Though the Skladanowskys can lay claim to the first successful (page 8)p. 8film projection, the Lumières were the ones to popularize the technology. Within months of the Paris screening, they had sent representatives around the world to exhibit their new apparatus, laying the foundations for the soon-dominant French film industry and conclusively demonstrating the worldwide appeal of the fledgling cinematic medium.

Yet it was the third iteration of the invention that proved the most fateful. This time, the technology appeared in the United States via the Edison Manufacturing Company. Thomas Edison, the famed innovator behind the light bulb and the phonograph, had preceded the Europeans with the 1894 release of the Kinetoscope, a device developed by his employee, William Dickson, that allowed for the hand-cranked, individual viewing of motion pictures. Kinetoscope parlors enjoyed a brief period of popularity, (page 9)p. 9but audiences soon clamored for the large-scale projection of the Bioscop and Cinématographe. Edison responded with the Vitascope, which would soon rival the Cinématographe as the era’s leading motion picture technology.

But Edison’s main innovation in motion pictures was more artistic than technological. The Lumières were convinced the appeal of motion pictures would be short lived, and thus they focused primarily on selling the Cinématographe itself; by 1905 they left the film industry entirely to pursue work in developing color photography. Edison, in contrast, believed in the entertainment potential of the medium and in 1894 established a dedicated motion picture department within the Edison Manufacturing Company, which eventually grew into one of the most important film studios of the silent era. Other production companies followed suit, and the motion picture industry was born.

This early version of the industry looked nothing like what we know in the twenty-first century, either in its industrial structure or in the films it made. Movie studios in the modern sense did not emerge for another two decades, and the earliest film companies, notably Edison and its leading French competitor Pathé Frères, founded in 1896, initially made much of their money from sales and licensing of their recording and projection technology, creating films primarily as a means to foster the spread of such equipment. The earliest films tended to be short and visually simple, running only a few minutes long (sometimes even just a few seconds) and featuring a straightforward recording of someone or something placed before the camera. Other producers without a stake in equipment sales soon emerged, but the focus on brief and modest films persisted.

To modern viewers, these films can seem like curious specimens with little entertainment appeal. Of the ten films shown at the Grand Café, all were under a minute in length. Most displayed simple scenes from life, with the camera placed at a fixed distance (page 10)p. 10from the subjects recorded. The best known is Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), taken outside the gates of the very factory where the Cinématographe was made. Others include Baby’s Meal (1895), in which Auguste Lumière and his wife feed their infant daughter, and The Sea (1895), in which bathers take turns diving off a jetty. Only one of the films approaches a condition of storytelling, a short called The Sprinkler Sprinkled (1895), in which a mischievous boy puts his foot on a garden hose and then releases it when a gardener holds the hose to his eye to investigate.

These modest films from the Grand Café presage much of the cinema’s first decade. Even as the first companies dedicated to producing films developed, the focus on recording scenes from life remained. Some proved quite exotic, as in the later Lumière film Panorama of the Grand Canal (1896), in which the Cinématographe was placed inside a Venetian gondola, creating the first instance of a moving camera. But others were surprisingly mundane. Among the most popular films of the period were Rough Sea at Dover (1896) by the British pioneer Birt Acres, showing waves in the English Channel, or the later Lumière film The Arrival of a Train (1896), capturing a few moments at the railroad station at La Ciotat. (Accounts that the film’s first audience fled the screen thinking the train was real are purely apocryphal.)

Even as other types of films developed during this period, they still tended to emphasize the unadorned recording of unfolding action. Edison focused initially on filming vaudeville performers and even at one point staged a boxing match inside its studio. Others, such as the American Vitagraph Company, focused on filming or re-creating news events in films known as topicals, while some companies recorded stage productions, with religious pageants proving especially popular.

(page 11)p. 11The most technically advanced films of the period were those that focused on tricks of the camera, using techniques of editing to make people seem to suddenly appear or disappear on screen or to make inanimate objects appear to move on their own as if haunted. The French filmmaker Georges Méliès, a successful stage magician, specialized in such films, as did the Anglo-American director J. Stuart Blackton, one of the founders of Vitagraph. Story films that told a fictional narrative over multiple scenes emerged during this period as well but remained generally austere in their construction. Though they might include a dozen or more scenes cut together through editing—as with Edison director Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), which depicted a daring Western heist and ran to fourteen scenes—each scene played out in full at a fixed distance from the camera, running from start to finish like a scene in a play before the next scene would begin. At their longest, such films never lasted more than about fifteen minutes, using no more than a single reel of film.

Isolated examples of cinematographic devices such as close-ups and camera movements abound in this era. The British filmmaker George Albert Smith was already using combinations of medium shots and close-ups in his films from the turn of the century—for example, in The Sick Kitten (1903), where the film cuts from a medium shot of a girl feeding a kitten to a close-up of the pet sipping a spoonful of milk. The Great Train Robbery itself includes a brief pan to capture the action of the robbery. Another film from 1903, Wallace McCutcheon’s A Search for Evidence, even uses point-of-view shots from the character’s perspective cut into the action as a wife peers through hotel keyholes looking for her husband and his mistress. Rarely were these visual devices used in a systematic way from film to film, however, and they were almost never used in combination within a single film. They were, in most cases, momentary stylistic flourishes designed to capture the viewer’s attention or to convey a particular story point without necessarily cohering into a concerted filmmaking approach.

(page 12)p. 12In fact, such flourishes often stand alongside other devices that seem to disrupt or confuse the narrative of the film. Numerous shorts of the period include repeated shots of the same action taken from different angles, as in A Trip to the Moon, where the film’s spaceship lands on the moon twice—once when it comically crashes into the man in the moon and a second time when it descends more realistically to the lunar surface. In a similarly confusing move, The Great Train Robbery includes a brief scene with no relationship to the film’s narrative. Here, an outlaw simply points his pistol at the camera and fires. Who the character is shooting or why is never explained: he seems, in fact, to be shooting the audience itself. Exhibitors were told they could place the scene either at the beginning or at the end of the film, because its position within the narrative made no difference.

These sorts of laissez-faire attitudes toward narrative clarity are indicative of a larger truth: early cinema is best understood not in terms of its relationship to storytelling so much as in its fascination with the appeal, surprise, and delight of film recording itself. This point was put forward by film scholars Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault, whose introduction of the term cinema of attractions in the 1980s revolutionized the understanding of early motion pictures. For the cinema’s first audiences, the main draw of motion pictures resided not in their ability to tell a story so much in as their capacity to enable new ways of seeing the world. Above all else, what early cinema audiences and filmmakers valued was the sense of visual amazement that the new technology of film enabled.

The idea that early cinema was premised on the property of attraction is intended to be quite literal. Most film exhibition during the cinema’s first decade was transient or opportunistic, and showing films was largely the work of traveling showmen. Journeying from town to town, they set up projectors wherever they could: in tent shows, in churches and meeting halls, and as part of traveling fairs, carnivals, and other amusements. In cities, (page 13)p. 13films were typically displayed at vaudeville theaters and music halls, played alongside the live comedy, music, and circus acts that were the theaters’ mainstay. Watching a film was intended to be an event and a thrill. Even a circus act might tell a story, but the appeal is not primarily narrative—it is the chance to be amazed by watching something you cannot see every day. In the case of early film, that something might well be the same world you could see around you already, only this time it was rendered suddenly novel by a camera that could record almost anything in existence and play it back at the showman’s command.

Had the era of early cinema somehow been able to persist unchanged, it is possible that film would never have become the narrative form we know it as. The primary mandate of early cinema was not complex storytelling so much as sudden spectacle. The vaudeville sketch, the acrobatics act, the panorama painting, the boxing match, the religious pageant: these were the realms with which cinema was affiliated in its earliest years, far more so than narrative forms like literature or drama. Yet in many ways the cinema succumbed to its own success. After years of existing as a traveling attraction, the medium witnessed a sea change as demand for motion pictures began to grow during the middle and later years of the twentieth century’s first decade. In response, filmmakers began to rely increasingly on the story film, viewing it as the surest means of creating new content expeditiously. Changes in demand began to foster changes in filmmaking style, and attraction gave way to narrative as the cinema’s foremost imperative.

Much of this change was precipitated by a revolution in the way that motion pictures were distributed. In cinema’s earliest years, production companies tended to only sell their films to exhibitors—a practice that necessitated the period’s traveling arrangements, because showmen had to move from place to place (page 14)p. 14seeking out new audiences just to turn a profit on a single purchased film. That began to change in the first years of the twentieth century with the emergence of a new middleman in the distribution chain: film exchanges that purchased film reels from the producers and then rented them to exhibitors, allowing those exhibitors to turn a profit with a single, fixed audience. Instead of traveling in a perpetual search for new viewers, exhibitors could now set up stationary exhibition halls in major population centers and provide the same customers with new films on a semiregular basis, cycling through films instead of cycling through audiences. Thus was born the nickelodeon, named for the nickel admission prices that these makeshift theaters typically charged.

Among filmmakers of the period, the so-called nickelodeon boom that started around 1905 created an outright crisis of content, as exhibitors demanded films at a rate they never had before. In 1907, the general manager of the Biograph Company declared that the studio was “pushed to the limit of its capacity by the demand for new subjects.” A new emphasis on storytelling presented the most effective solution: scripting and filming stories under the controlled conditions of the film studio and its immediate environs provided an efficient way to manufacture the novelty that audiences demanded at the volume exhibitors now expected.

But this in turn created new problems, a crisis of content of a very different sort. In the absence of dialogue and sound, how could filmmakers convey the kind of longer, more complex narratives that were needed? The broad storytelling style of early cinema no longer sufficed. In making The Great Train Robbery in 1903, it hardly mattered to director Edwin Porter or to his audiences who the robbers were or what their individual motivations might be: the sheer spectacle of the robbery itself and the thrill of watching it unfold constituted the primary pleasures of the film. But now such details of character and story mattered quite a lot—if only to differentiate the story of this train robbery from the one the studio would produce next week, as well as the dozens of similar films (page 15)p. 15competing studios were making at the same time. For the first time, story had become an economic necessity for the cinema.

It is this imperative more than any other factor that helps explain the worldwide shift in filmmaking styles during this time, sometimes referred to as a move toward a cinema of narrative integration. The period from around 1908 to the early 1910s was an era of tremendous experimentation as production companies competed against one another to create clear, compelling stories that would keep audiences coming back to see their latest films and exhibitors signing up to book their newest offerings. Pressed for ways to make narrative films more intelligible, filmmakers turned to the kinds of visual devices first tested during the era of early cinema and now deployed not as visual flourishes but as means of systematically directing audience attention and presenting narrative information—hence the profusion of films using close-ups, where the camera frames an actor’s face to better capture her expression, and cut-ins, where the camera focuses in detail on an object in the scene. Equally prevalent were all manner of camera movements, including pans, where the camera moves from side to side, and tracking shots, where the camera physically moves to follow a figure. This was also the era when intertitles—black-and-white cards containing narrative information or lines of dialogue that were inserted into the film—began to proliferate and when modern editing practices began to emerge.

Yet if the defining feature of the transitional period was a constant searching for new means of visual storytelling, the outcomes of these experiments were in no way consistent among the many filmmakers active during this time. In some cases, filmmakers managed to solve narrative problems with only limited use of camera and editing solutions, keeping the number of shots and edits to a minimum while crafting a more deliberate arrangement of space and action within a mostly static frame. This is sometimes referred to as staging in depth, which became prevalent in many European countries. Its most notable (page 16)p. 16practitioner in the United States was Charlie Chaplin, who started directing his own films early in his career, in 1914, focusing on a deliberate control of movement in the frame over and above any reliance on camerawork or editing.

Other filmmakers chose to emphasize techniques of the camera as a solution to narrative impasse. This became a key component in the “Vitagraph look” that defined the films of the Vitagraph Company during the transitional years. In 1909, Vitagraph shortened the standard distance between camera and subject in its studio by instituting an official “nine-foot line,” changing the default shot distance from a long shot, encompassing the entirety of an actor’s body, to a medium-long shot, cut off at the ankles, or even a medium shot, cut off at the waist, thus bringing viewers significantly closer to the actors and the action. Filmmakers at the studio also endeavored to focus narrative attention by employing angles other than the straight-on, frontal views practiced by others at the time. This gave Vitagraph’s pictures a remarkably natural look for the period, and Vitagraph actors were even permitted to turn their backs to the camera if it helped in the staging of a scene.

Ultimately, the most radical solution to the challenge of narrative—and by far the most influential—relied not on staging within the frame or adjusting shot distances but on revolutionizing the film industry’s approach to editing. This position is associated most closely with D. W. Griffith, who joined the Biograph Company in 1908. Though he was conservative in employing the kind of varied camerawork with which others were experimenting at the time, he became committed early in his career to a liberal use of editing, which he viewed as the most effective means of enabling the kinds of multilayered stories he wanted to tell. By his last year at Biograph, 1913, Griffith’s films had more than twice as many shots as an average motion picture of that era. Many in the industry fretted about them being comprehensible to audiences, with one critic complaining that (page 17)p. 17“three times the proper number of scenes are used to cover up the thinness of Director Griffith’s on-the-flap-of-an-envelope stories.” But the commercial success of Griffith’s films was undeniable, and the director persisted in his use of rapid editing for the remainder of his long career.

Taken alone, none of the main techniques of narrative emphasis utilized during the transitional era became definitive to later film. Even Griffith’s hyperreliance on editing, which perhaps came closest to presaging later film style, can seem quite strange to viewers today. Yet in the varied techniques of the period lay the first foundations of what filmmaking would eventually become. During this era, films became longer and more visually and narratively complex. Two-reel films, running between twenty and thirty minutes, began to replace one-reel shorts as the norm, and the period saw the first experiments with feature-length filmmaking, which eventually became standard in the industry.

Everything about filmmaking expanded during this period. For the first time, purpose-built theaters became the worldwide norm: first in the low-end nickelodeons and then later in elaborate movie palaces modeled on the ornate theaters and opera halls of the age. In many countries, the advent of the movie palace corresponded with a bid to expand the appeal of motion pictures themselves, transitioning the medium from a working-class entertainment of the fairground to a middle-class pastime associated with affordable luxury.

Filmmaking was quickly becoming big business, and the period saw intensifying competition among producers the world over. In the United States, the Edison Company had long been locked in a series of patent lawsuits and competitive maneuvers against its two main rivals, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, founded in 1895 by Edison employee William Dickson, and the Vitagraph Company, founded in 1898 by two vaudevillians seeking to produce films to accompany their acts. After nearly a decade of (page 18)p. 18conflict, Edison changed course in 1908 and aligned with its competitors to form an oligopolistic trust called the Motion Picture Patents Company, colloquially known as the Edison Trust, which aimed to use its power to manipulate film exhibition practices within the United States and eliminate smaller competitors. Elsewhere, companies in France, Italy, Germany, and England all jockeyed for control of international markets, responding in part to the new difficulties in exhibiting foreign motion pictures in the United States created by the Trust.

But the strong-arm tactics that defined industrial relations during this period ultimately proved shortsighted and short lived. A series of independent producers who had started to shift production to America’s West Coast began to wrest control away from the Trust almost as soon as it was established, partly by offering exhibitors an alternative to its restrictions, partly by taking advantage of antitrust actions initiated by the federal government, and partly by purchasing their own exhibition venues so as to simply bypass the Trust. This trend toward vertical integration—wherein a studio controls the entire life cycle of a film, from its production to its exhibition—soon became dominant in the film industry. Taken in total, the efforts of these upstart West Coast producers to outmaneuver the Trust constituted the initial rise of Hollywood.

If the transitional period was an epoch of frenetic experimentation, the era of classical cinema that followed marked a moment of consolidation and tightened control in film industries the world over. This was the epoch that witnessed the ascendance of Hollywood, which during these years became the locus of the most influential and profitable film industry on the planet. The groundwork for Hollywood’s success lay in the battles waged between the independent studios of the West Coast, including the Universal Film Manufacturing Company (later (page 19)p. 19Universal Studios) and the Famous Players Film Company (which eventually became Paramount), with the Edison Trust, but business acumen in distribution and exhibition was not the only or even the primary reason for these studios’ ultimate success. Equally important was the unique manner of film production that these companies developed during the middle and later 1910s, turning filmmaking from a quasi-artisanal process headed by a film’s director to a semi-industrial one overseen by a producer.

Taking advantage of the abundant space and low labor costs afforded by their locations outside Los Angeles, the West Coast studios began in the later transitional era and early classical period to amass large staff pools of filmmaking specialists—set builders, costume designers, makeup artists, camera technicians, and a stable of actors always at the ready—and leveraged this scale to enable the production of multiple films simultaneously and in steady succession. In this manner, the West Coast studios solved once and for all the problems of volume that beset so many producers during the transitional age. Having refined the processes of filmmaking into a seamless industrial sequence, major studios such as the newly consolidated Famous Players–Lasky Corporation could, by the start of the 1920s, produce as many as a hundred feature films each year—more than enough to keep their theater holdings booked and their audiences satisfied. With these methods in place, the Hollywood studios initiated a period of profound consolidation in the American film industry. By 1922, just eight major studios accounted for close to 80 percent of all domestic film production in the United States.

With such advances in industrial consolidation came a corresponding level of standardization in acceptable filmmaking styles within the Hollywood studios. It is this aspect of the era that gives its name to the period, the classical style of filmmaking being a reference to both the kinds of stories movies were allowed to tell and the way those stories were presented on screen as established and policed by the studios, which always kept a careful watch over (page 20)p. 20the filmmakers under their control. From the variety of tactics tested and deployed across the transitional era, the producers who became the guardians of classical style validated a certain set of filmmaking norms that they expected to be followed in predictable ways. Stories would be clear and comprehensible, lighting and camerawork would be restrained and relatively inconspicuous, and the central action and principal characters of a scene would be obvious to the audience at all times. The aim of this style was seamless narrative clarity. Audiences going to see a Hollywood picture could be assured that the film would endeavor to be accessible, intelligible, and engaging at every moment.

Relying on a roster of movie stars to draw audiences to their films and a cohort of directors to maintain their stylistic standards, the Hollywood studios exercised strict control over their products. Filmmakers seen as not hewing to studio expectations were reined in or kicked out, as was the case with the visionary director Erich von Stroheim. His insistence on artistic control and disregard for budgets—the original cut of his masterpiece Greed (1924), about a couple slowly torn apart by money, ran to ten hours—eventually made him unhireable and prompted him to relocate to Europe. Filmmakers who had risen to prominence before the classical period were ill-fitted to this new studio culture, and they knew it. Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith—each an exemplar of very different transitional-era filmmaking styles, with Chaplin favoring a careful arrangement within the frame and Griffith emphasizing rapid editing across a scene—banded together despite their differences and worked with movie stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to found a new company called United Artists. Focused on distributing films made by those working outside the major studios, the company provided a haven for filmmakers unable or unwilling to assimilate into the studio culture.

Eventually, mass-produced Hollywood films came to dominate not only the American film market but also much of the world market during this period. Beyond its unique production system, (page 21)p. 21Hollywood enjoyed several economic advantages that made it well positioned for global expansion. Most important, the American market was large enough to support exceptionally high production expenditures, and the average Hollywood budget was as much as ten times more than that of most European films of the period. With the studios generally able to recoup those expenses during a film’s domestic run, they could then distribute those big-budget films internationally at steep discounts and undercut foreign competitors even in their home countries, beating them on both production values and cost. These efforts at global expansion were further aided by aggressive government support. The first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, a trade association formed by the Hollywood studios in 1922, was a former federal cabinet official named William Hays, whose influence was instrumental in convincing the US Commerce Department and State Department to prioritize the expansion of the film industry, with American officials often advocating for laxer film import laws in their negotiations with foreign counterparts.

But the most important factor in Hollywood’s global rise had nothing to do with filmmaking. Rather, it was the devastation of the First World War that created a gross imbalance between the American studios and their European competitors that in some cases was never redressed. From its early position as a worldwide leader in film production, the French film industry declined precipitously during the years of the conflict and never regained its former prominence. The film industries in England and Italy underwent similar transitions, with only Germany emerging as a possible competitor to Hollywood during the classical era, its industry being paradoxically buoyed by inflationary problems in the postwar economy. Yet even in their diminished status, the various European film industries exerted a profound influence on the stylistics of silent film during the classical era. In contrast to the understatement and narrative clarity emphasized in the Hollywood classical style, European filmmakers drew from the (page 22)p. 22fine arts and the theater in crafting visually elaborate and narratively complicated works—films that emphasized the kind of unusual and unexpected uses of the camera and challenging, ambiguous stories that Hollywood eschewed. For many film aficionados, the refinement of the Hollywood classical style combined with the artistry of its competing European movements marks the silent era’s classical period as a high point in motion picture history.

It is a testament to how stable, profitable, and successful the silent film industry had become during the classical age that most of the major Hollywood studios rejected offers to incorporate sound into their films when the technology finally became available in the mid-1920s. It was only through the efforts of an upstart studio—the smaller Warner Bros., looking for a competitive advantage against its larger rivals—that sound even entered the landscape of filmmaking at this time. The change was seismic. But we should not let the vast scope of that change overshadow the achievements that came before it. From a vaudeville interstitial and traveling fairground attraction, film had developed over the decades of the silent era into a stable global industry and mass culture phenomenon. Even as the industry was revolutionized by the introduction of sound beginning in 1927, the impact and the legacy of its silent years remained.