Archives: Cine qua non

The rise of the Hollywood system started with companies which developed a way of manufacturing films on a large scale. It went on to be so successful that European companies sent over people to study and, if possible copy, it. Among these American companies was Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, created in 1916 after the merger of Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Film Company -- originally formed by Zukor as Famous Players in Famous Plays -- and Jesse L Lasky's Feature Play Company. Eventually eight production companies were incorporated into this giant, which went on...

Before Hollywood had come an abject failure – that of the Motion Pictures Patent Company (MPPC) to monopolise the film business. This was a cartel of 11 leading American and European producers of films and manufacturers of cameras and projectors. In December 1908, a “trust” was formed by major American film companies (Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, Kalem, American Star, American Pathé), the leading film distributor (George Kleine) and the biggest supplier of raw film stock, Eastman Kodak, to inflate the prices of equipment they alone could manufacture....

In the early years of film production, cinema as a medium did not threaten the cultural status quo. Non-fiction films had dominated and films were always exhibited in “respectable” venues like vaudeville and opera houses, churches, and lecture halls. Films started making an impact on the cultural landscape with the story films becoming gradually popular, and exhibition of films gradually shifting to the nickelodeons. ...

The first blockbuster in film history was argubaly the fallout of Hollywood’s first major ego clash. David Wark Griffith, better known as as a shorter DW Griffith, who had failed to make it big in theatre and had subsequently written scnarios and acted in films of Edison Studios, produced and directed the Biograph film Judith of Bethulia in 1914. This was one of the earliest feature films to be produced in the United States. But Biograph thought that longer films were not viable. They believed that a movie that long (61 minutes) would hurt the audience's eyes. Griffith...

Once the early filmmakers got over the fact that a film could be made of more than one shot, the multi-shot film became the norm of the day. Films of the 1902/3-07 period were no longer treating the individual shot as a self-contained unit of meaning. One shot was now linked to another. It was like putting words together to form a meaningful sentence. The grammar, in any, of course, was far from evolving. Filmmakers used succession of shots to capture ane emphasise the highpoints of the action rather than construct either a linear narrative causality or even try to establish...

The shot, as the smallest unit in a film, developed in the pre-1907 period, also known in cinema history as Early Cinema. Film historians, in fact, break up even this period into two segments: 1894-1902/3, when the majority of films consisted of one shot and were what we would today call documentary films, known at that time as actualities (based on the way the French described them); and 1903-07, when the multi-shot, fiction film gradually emerged, with simple narratives structuring the temporal (related to time) and causal relationships between shots. In this era, filmmakers were...

In the beginning, of course, there was no cinema as we understand it today. It took 20 years for the novelty of 1895 to transform into an industry. The earliest films were inane snapshots, roughly a minute in length, and often made up of a single shot. Not many dared to experiment initially. But slowly, by 1905, the average duration increased to roughly 5-10 minutes, and even employed changes of scene and camera position to illustrate a story or a theme. ...

A little more than a 100 years ago, a 20-year-old girl who barely knew the facts of life, accidentally became pregnant. At the turn of the 20th century when the very idea of single mothers would have been outlandish and scandalous even in Europe, this gritty young woman refused to marry the would-be-father. She brought up the child on her own. The life of Asta Nielsen (born 1881) today is canned history, but if one were to be told about her, it would be no surprise to know that the first truly great international film star was a woman. The unjustly forgotten Nielsen was born in...

“Of everything other than thought, there can be no history.” RG Collingwood, The Idea of History Watersheds, when looked at closely – as film historian Eric Rhode wrote – become less distinctive once one delves deep into them. And to be just to the progenitors of cinema, no single discovery or invention was isolated – everything was built on a previous milestone or observation. The roots of cinema were lost in spools of films when the world paid homage to Auguste and Louis Lumiere on December 28, 1995. This commemorated 100 years of the so-called birth of cinema,...

The Indian film industry is one of the largest in the world, and Indian cinema is unmatched in its variety. Tracing the history of Indian cinema through the traditional methods is not tedious – it is too gargantuan a task. This is just an occasional attempt to revisit the Indian film history, and look at various aspects that have made Indian films so memorable, through different prisms. This time, we take a look at 10 celebrated, creative collaborators. There would be needless to say, problems with this list, for no finite list can be all-encompassing. ...