Classical Hollywood cinema

History

Silent era and emergence of the classical style

For millennia, the only visual standard of narrative storytelling art was the theatre. Since the first narrative films in the mid-late 1890s, filmmakers have sought to capture the power of live theatre on the cinema screen. Most of these filmmakers started as directors on the late 19th-century stage, and likewise, most film actors had roots in vaudeville (e.g. the Marx Brothers) or theatrical melodramas. Visually, early narrative films had adapted little from the stage, and their narratives had adapted very little from vaudeville and melodrama. Before the visual style which would become known as "classical continuity," scenes were filmed in full shot and used carefully choreographed staging to portray plot and character relationships. Editing technique was extremely limited, and mostly consisted of close-ups of writing on objects for their legibility.

Though lacking the reality inherent to the stage, film (unlike the stage) offers the freedom to manipulate apparent time and space, and thus create the illusion of realism – that is temporal linearity and spatial continuity. By the early 1910s, filmmaking was beginning to fulfill its artistic potential. In Sweden and Denmark, this period would later be known as the "Golden Age" of the film; in the United States, this artistic change is attributed to filmmakers like D. W. Griffith finally breaking the grip of the Edison Trust to make films independent of the manufacturing monopoly. Films worldwide began to noticeably adopt visual and narrative elements which would be found in classical Hollywood cinema. 1913 was a particularly fruitful year for the medium, as pioneering directors from several countries produced films such as The Mothering Heart (D. W. Griffith), Ingeborg Holm (Victor Sjöström), and L'enfant de Paris (Léonce Perret) that set new standards for the film as a form of storytelling. It was also the year when Yevgeni Bauer (the first true film artist, according to Georges Sadoul) started his short, but prolific, career.

In the world generally and United States specifically, the influence of Griffith on filmmaking was unmatched. Equally influential were his actors in adapting their performances to the new medium. Lillian Gish, the star of film short The Mothering Heart, is particularly noted for her influence on on-screen performance techniques. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, also starring Gish, was ground-breaking for film as a means of storytelling – a masterpiece of literary narrative with numerous innovative visual techniques. The film initiated so many advances in United States cinema that it was rendered obsolete within a few years. Though 1913 was a global landmark for filmmaking, 1917 was primarily a United States one; the era of "classical Hollywood cinema" is distinguished by a narrative and visual style which began to dominate the film medium in America by 1917.

Start of the sound era and Golden Age of Hollywood

The narrative and visual style of classical Hollywood developed further after the transition to sound-film production. The primary changes in American filmmaking came from the film industry itself, with the height of the studio system. This mode of production, with its reigning star system promoted by several key studios, had preceded sound by several years. The Big 5 studios consisted of MGM, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, RKO, and Paramount. By the late 1920s, most of the prominent American directors and actors, who had worked independently since the early 1910s, had to become a part of the new studio system to continue to work. The Jazz Singer and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, both released in 1927, introduced synchronized sound to feature films, and Hollywood's box-office profits increased. By 1929, the silent age had definitively ended and been usurped by the "talkies".

Most Hollywood pictures from the late 1920s to 1960s adhered closely to a genre — Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, and biopic (biographical picture) — and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films; Alfred Newman worked at 20th Century Fox for twenty years; Cecil B. DeMille's films were almost all made at Paramount Pictures; and director Henry King's films were mostly made for 20th Century Fox. Similarly, actors were mostly contract players. Film historians note that it took about a decade for films to adapt to sound and return to the level of artistic quality of the silents, which they did in the late 1930s.

Many great works of cinema that emerged from this period were of highly regimented filmmaking. One reason this was possible is that, as so many films were made, not every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors. This was the case with Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), which is regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. Other directors, such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Frank Capra, battled the studios in order to achieve their artistic visions. The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939, which saw the release of such classics as The Wizard of Oz; Gone with the Wind; The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Stagecoach; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Destry Rides Again; Young Mr. Lincoln; Wuthering Heights; Only Angels Have Wings; Ninotchka; Beau Geste; Babes in Arms; Gunga Din; The Women; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; and The Roaring Twenties.

Though the studio system dominated the first half of the Golden Age, the system came to an end in 1948 with the Paramount Decree. This marked the studios' loss of both their own movie theaters and the creative talent they had held under contract.

New Hollywood

The New Hollywood period of the 1960s to 1980s was influenced by the romanticism of the classical era, with filmmakers looking to take bigger and bigger risks in the pursuit of their specific interests amidst the general mistrust of authority. The French New Wave was influenced by it as well, particularly in terms of the beliefs held by artistic figures such as André Bazin that movies morally should serve as personalized projects by their directors to the degree that each and every one represents a director's individual vision. Classical Hollywood holds a foundational place in the identity and curation of film today and still impacts the style in which film makers decide to take.

Hollywood's movement shaped many new directors of the 1970s, who built upon classical conventions, adding more personal and experimental approaches to filmmaking. Martin Scorsese is a notable director who used new editing and character types.