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Movies in America

Project: Culture and Civilisation

Students: Adelheid Cucu

Oana Ungur

Class: XII E


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The cinema of the United States has had a profound effect on cinema across the world

since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods:

the silent film era,classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary

period. Since the 1920s, the American film industry has grossed more money every year

than that of any other country.

In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power ofphotography to capture

motion. In 1894, the world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given inNew

York City, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The United States was in the forefront

ofsound film's development in the following decades. Since the early 20th century, the

U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, Los Angeles,

California. Picture City, FL was also a planned site for a movie picture production center

in the 1920s, but due to the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, the idea collapsed and Picture

Citywas returned back to the original name ofHobe Sound. DirectorD. W. Griffith wascentral to the development offilm grammarand Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is

frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of all time. American screen actors

like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe have become iconic figures, while

producer/entrepreneurWalt Disney was a leader in both animated film and

movie merchandising. The major film studios of Hollywood are the primary source of the

most commercially successful movies in the world, such as Gone with the

Wind(1939),Star Wars (1977), Titanic (1997), andAvatar(2009). Today, American film

studios collectively generate several hundred movies every year, making the United

States the third most prolific producer of films in the world the first being India and

the second beingNigeria.

Rise of Hollywood

In early 1910, directorD.W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the West

coast with his acting troupe, consisting of actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary

Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia

Street in downtown Los Angeles. While there, the company decided to explore new

territories, traveling several miles north to Hollywood, a little village that was friendly

and enjoyed the movie company filming there. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever

shot in Hollywood,In Old California, a Biograph melodrama about California in the 19th

century, when it belonged to Mexico. Biograph stayed there for months and made several

films before returning to New York. After hearing about Biograph's success in

Hollywood, in 1913 many movie-makers headed west to avoid the fees imposed

by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process. In Los Angeles,
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California, the studios and Hollywood grew. Before World War I, movies were made in

several U.S. cities, but filmmakers gravitated to southern California as the industry

developed. They were attracted by the mild climate and reliable sunlight, which made it

possible to film movies outdoors year-round, and by the varied scenery that was

available. There are several starting points for cinema (particularly American cinema),

but it was Griffith's controversial 1915 epicBirth of a Nation that pioneered the

worldwide filming vocabulary that still dominates celluloid to this day.

In the early 20th century, when the medium was new, many Jewish immigrants found

employment in the U.S. film industry. They were able to make their mark in a brand-new

business: the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons, after

their admission price of a nickel (five cents). Within a few years, ambitious men

like Samuel Goldwyn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, and

the Warner Brothers (Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack) had switched to the productionside of the business. Soon they were the heads of a new kind of enterprise: the movie

studio. (It is worth noting that the US had at least one female director, producer and

studio head in these early years, Alice Guy-Blach.) They also set the stage for the

industry's internationalism; the industry is often accused of Amero-centric provincialism.

Other moviemakers arrived from Europe after World War I: directors like Ernst

Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir; and actors likeRudolph

Valentino,Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Colman, and Charles Boyer. They joined a

homegrown supply of actors lured west from the New York City stage after theintroduction of sound films to form one of the 20th century's most remarkable growth

industries. At motion pictures' height of popularity in the mid-1940s, the studios were

cranking out a total of about 400 movies a year, seen by an audience of 90 million

Americans per week.

Sound also became widely used in Hollywood in the late 1920s . AfterThe Jazz Singer,

the first film with synchronized voices, was successfully released as a Vitaphone talkie in

1927, Hollywood film companies would respond to Warner Bros. and begin to use

Vitaphone sound which Warner Bros. owned until 1928 - in future films. By May1928, Electrical Research Product Incorporated (ERPI), a subsidiary of the Western

Electric company, gained a monopoly over film sound distribution . A side effect of the

"talkies" was that many actors who had made their careers in silent films suddenly found

themselves out of work, as they often had bad voices or could not remember their lines.

Meanwhile, in 1922, US politician Will H. Haysleft politics and formed the movie studio

boss organization known as the Motion Pictures Distributors Association of America
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(MPDAA) . The organization became the Motion Picture Association of America after

Hays retired in 1945.

In the early times oftalkies, American studios found that their sound productions were

rejected in foreign-language markets and even among speakers of other dialects of

English. The synchronization technology was still too primitive fordubbing. One of the

solutions was creating parallel foreign-language versions of Hollywood films. Around

1930, the American companies opened a studio in Joinville-le-Pont, France, where the

same sets and wardrobe and even mass scenes were used for different time-sharing crews.

Also, foreign unemployed actors, playwrights and winners ofphotogenia contests were

chosen and brought to Hollywood, where they shot parallel versions of the English-

language films. These parallel versions had a lower budget, were shot at night and were

directed by second-line American directors who did not speak the foreign language. The

Spanish-language crews included people likeLuis Buuel, Enrique JardielPoncela, Xavier Cugat and Edgar Neville. The productions were not very successful in

their intended markets, due to the following reasons:

The lower budgets were apparent.

Many theater actors had no previous experience in cinema.

The original movies were often second-rate themselves, since studios expected

that the top productions would sell by themselves.

The mix of foreign accents (Castilian, Mexican, and Chilean for example in the

Spanish case) was odd for the audiences.

Some markets lacked sound-equipped theaters.

In spite of this, some productions like the Spanish version ofDracula compare favorably

with the original. By the mid-1930s, synchronization had advanced enough for dubbing

to become usual.

Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film, directed by and starring Orson Welles.

The film is often considered the greatest of all time and is particularly praised for its

innovative cinematography, music and narrative structure. Citizen Kane was Welles' firstfeature film. The film was nominated forAcademy Awards in nine categories; it won

an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) by Herman Mankiewicz and

Welles. It was released by RKO Pictures.

The story is afilm clefthat examines the life and legacy ofCharles Foster Kane, played

by Welles, a character based upon the American newspaper magnate William Randolph
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Hearst and Welles' own life.]Upon its release, Hearst prohibited mention of the film in

any of his newspapers. Kane's career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social

service, but gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power. Narrated principally

through flashbacks, the story is revealed through the research of a newsreel reporter

seeking to solve the mystery of the newspaper magnate's dying word: "Rosebud."

PLOT

Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), an enormously wealthy media proprietor, has been

living alone in Florida in his vast palatial estate Xanadu for the last years of his life, with

a "No trespassing" sign on the gate. He dies in a bed while holding a snow globe and

utters "Rosebud..."; the globe slips from his lifeless hand and smashes. Kane's death then

becomes sensational news around the world. Newsreel reporter Jerry Thompson (William

Alland) tries to find out about Kane's private life and, in particular, to discover the

meaning behind his last word. The reporter interviews the great man's friends and

associates, and Kane's story unfolds as a series of flashbacks. Thompson approaches

Kane's second wife, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), now an alcoholic who runs

her own club, but she refuses to tell him anything. Thompson then goes to the private

archive of Walter Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris), a deceased banker who served as

Kane's guardian during his childhood and adolescence. It is through Thatcher's written

memoirs that Thompson learns about Kane's childhood. Thompson then interviews

Kane's personal business manager Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), best friend Jedediah

Leland (Joseph Cotten), Susan for a second time, and Kane's butler Raymond (PaulStewart) at Xanadu.

Flashbacks reveal that Kane's childhood was spent in poverty in Colorado (his parents ran

a boarding house), until the "world's third largest gold mine" was discovered on an

apparently worthless property his mother had acquired. He is forced to leave his mother

(Agnes Moorehead) when she sends him away to the East Coast of the U.S. to live with

Thatcher, to be educated. After gaining full control over his possessions at the age of 25,

Kane enters the newspaper business with sensationalized yellow journalism. He takes

control of the newspaper, theNew York Inquirer, and hires all the best journalists. Hisattempted rise to power is documented, including his manipulation of public opinion for

the Spanish American War; his first marriage to Emily Monroe Norton (Ruth Warrick),

a President's niece; and his campaign for the office of governor ofNew York State, for

which alternative newspaper headlines are created depending on the result.
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Kane's marriage disintegrates over the years, and he begins an affair with Susan

Alexander. Both his wife and his opponent discover the affair, simultaneously ending his

marriage and his political career. Kane marries his mistress, and forces her into

an operatic career for which she has no talent or ambition. Kane finally allows her to

abandon her singing career after she attempts suicide, but after a span of time spent in

boredom and isolation in Xanadu, she ultimately leaves him.

Kane spends his last years building his vast estate and lives alone, interacting only with

his staff. The butler recounts that Kane had said "Rosebud" after Susan left him, right

after seeing a snow globe.

At Xanadu, Kane's vast number of belongings are being cataloged, ranging from priceless

works of art to worthless furniture. During this time, Thompson finds that he is unable to

solve the mystery and concludes that "Rosebud" will forever remain an enigma. He

theorizes that "Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it.

Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost." In the ending of

the film, it is revealed to the audience that Rosebud was the name of the sled from Kane's

childhoodan allusion to the only time in his life when he was truly happy. The sled,

thought to be junk, is burned and destroyed by Xanadu's departing staff in a basement

furnace.

Citizen Kane, with 9 nominations, was the 16th film to get more than six Academy

Awards nominations. It was nominated for:

Outstanding Motion Picture RKO Radio Pictures (Orson Welles, Producer)

Best DirectorOrson Welles

Best ActorOrson Welles

Best Writing (Original Screenplay) Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz

Best Art Direction (Black-and-White)Perry Ferguson, Van Nest Polglase, A.

Roland Fields, Darrell Silvera

Best Film Editing Robert Wise

Best Cinematography (Black-and-White) Gregg Toland

Best Music (Score of a Dramatic Picture) Bernard Herrmann

Best Sound Recording John O. Aalberg

It was widely thought the film would win most of the awards it was nominated for, but it

only won the Best Writing (Original Screenplay) Oscar
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