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. '' (1915), starring
Lillian Gish (second from right) 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. '' (1925) 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.
Sound era 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 mid-1920, 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 beginning of the sound era itself is ambiguously defined. To some, it began with
The Jazz Singer and
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans in 1927, when
synchronized sound was introduced to feature films and box-office profits increased. To others, the era began in 1929, when the silent age had definitively ended.
Golden Age of Hollywood 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
Citizen Kane (1941), directed by
Orson Welles and regarded as one of the
greatest films of all time. Other strong-willed directors, like
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.
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. 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. ==Stylistic conventions==