Amon Carter Museum exhibition explores Hollywood’s rise to cultural juggernaut

Roughly 100 years before Facebook inspired the media industry to “pivot to video,” Karl Struss was experimenting with motion pictures.

The German American fine arts photographer and cinematographer was one of the architects of Hollywood — Struss shared the first Academy Award for cinematography with Charles Rosher for their work on “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.”

That golden statuette, numerous silent films, more than 100 film still images and other archival materials are now on view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in “Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood.”

The exhibition is the museum’s first retrospective on Struss’ work in 30 years.

His career is a helpful vector for visitors to trace the development of the film industry long before it was the cultural juggernaut we know today, exhibition co-curator Kristen Gaylord said.

“The second film that (Struss) ever worked on was actually never released because there was a case about whether a film of a play was the same thing as the play itself,” said Gaylord, now the Herzfeld curator of photography and media arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum. “We all know that a movie or a play are two very different art forms. But at the time it was still contested, so this film was never released.”

Courtesy Photo

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Karl Struss (1886-1981); Gloria Swanson in the Lion’s Den — Fantasy Sequence from “Male and Female”; 1919; Gelatin silver print; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; P1983.23.171

While the film wasn’t released, the still images remain and were printed in a magazine before the case was decided at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Struss’ experience as a still photographer helped him gain a foothold in the world of cinema.

In 1919, the same year that Struss moved to Los Angeles from New York, he went from shooting promotional photos for films to standing behind a movie camera.

Cecil B. DeMille gave Struss that opportunity on the sets of “For Better, For Worse” and “Male and Female.”

The soft-focus imagery of the early film industry was born out of the Struss Pictorial Lens, which was the first of its kind to be used in motion pictures.

Later, he stunned viewers with his ability to transform Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde through the use of colored camera lenses that responded to the actor’s makeup.

As the industry grew, studios produced videos about how movies were made, and Struss was an obvious choice to feature in the cinematographer’s seat.

“If we’re going to explain the industry at all: how the lighting works, the jobs that they do, where the cameras are — this is Struss,” Gaylord said. “He’s the one selected by the academy to serve that role, so I think it’s a really potent sign of his place in the industry. … And it’s a really nice sign of how far his career had come from that 1919 moment when he stepped off the train and had never before been behind a movie camera.”

The exhibition runs through Aug. 25.

Marcheta Fornoff covers arts and culture for the Fort Worth Report. Reach her at marcheta.fornoff@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board. Read more about our editorial independence policyhere.

This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.