Website Review - EarlyCinema.com

EarlyCinema.com is a great British based website to understand the broadscope of technology in early cinema from a global context as opposed to an American perspective. In a simple layout the site provides an overview about the development of technology in cinema based on the inventions and pioneers. There is an alphabetical index combining all the information about this early cinema technology, which function particularly well with the timeline. However, contact details have been provided to assist the user with queries, which is an additional perk to the site.
The resources is relatively small, but there is generally a great deal of repetition in published texts about early cinema technology. Therefore, the quality is far more important than the quantity, but the user should note that the resources are predominantly British. This offers a slightly different historical perspective to the United States by presenting a more aesthetic connection to technology as opposed to the business and industrial relationship with technology reflected in the United States cinema history.

Landmark Film - Jazz Singer

The narrative of Singin' In the Rain is driven by the introduction of 'talkies', which features a scene discussing the impactand popularity of the first feature-length film, Jazz Singer (1927). This intertextual reference is symbolic in two ways:

• Warner Bros. film was successful and placed pressure on other studios to change to talkies; and
• The film has a tendency to be falsely consider the 'historic moment' of when sound in film was invented.

The sound in Jazz Singer was predominantly made up of singing with only a few sequences of synchronised dialogue and produced on vitaphone sound-on-disc system. While the film extended on the use of sound in Don Juan, but sound was still at an infantile stage. However, the success of the film enourage the major studio who were Paramount, Lowes and First National to follow Warner Bros. By 1928, the sound on disc was replaced with sound being photographed straight on to the film.

A little trivia: the sound was processed on the left hand side of the film.

Fox Movietone

Fox Studios is a major player in contemporary cinema, but started out as a minor studio in the 1920s with a great deal of ambition. While Warners Bros. went down the pop video direction, which established musical genre, Fox produced newsreels using movietone sound system. The studio wanted to differentiate with Warners, but utilise sound technology, which established newsreel cinema that has played a significant role in documentary cinema.
The introduction of sound in Warners Bros. production was a primary focus, whereas sound was an element of a huge acquisition by Fox in the 1920s. This led to an extensive vertical integration project where Fox purchased theatre chains, distribution rights and production including German director F.W. Murnau, who made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) a highly artistic film using synchronised music and sound effects track including intertitles.

Star Quality - Smeck Goes Pop

The visual impact of postmodernity came to life in the 1980s with retro fashion and major shifts in pop culture from the multiplex screening 'high concept' films marketed at teenagers to the shopping mall culture. The 'pop' in culture was most evident in music through the evolution of MTV and other music programs. The music video became a phenomenon, where music was no longer judged on the song alone, but the images that came with it. As a decade, the 80s have been more ridiculed than the invention of bell-bottoms in the 70s, which has become a 'most-have' fashion item of women's contemporary fashion. The music clip has tendency of being linked to the 80s, but the integration of music and images was explored from the beginnings of sound. In 1926, Warners established a program of short films starring vaudeville stars, inparticular the multi-talented musician Roy Smeck (1900-1994). The format provided the stars with opportunity to display their talent through a routine or song to a broader audience in provincial places the stars could not financial access. The short film operated in a similar fashion to the pop video by promoting and selling talent.

Colour - The Early Processes

The use of colour was desired, but the process remained complex where colour was added onto the black and white images. One of the earliest procedures was hand colouring by large groups of employees painting the film frame by frame, which is a similar industrial process of early animation drawings. Another way was creating an emotional atmosphere to the film by dyeing sequences, which is evident in Robert Weine's German expressionist film Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920). In Nosferatu (1922) the colour is used to provide a internal explanation about the characters, which is exemplified by green reflecting Ellen's mental instability. However, the development of sound conflicted with the tinting process because it had a tendency of bleeding onto the audio track.
The additive colour process was introduced, which used red/green filters on a rotating colour wheel in sync with the film. It was projected onto the film removing the issue of bleeding, but the prcoess was highly unstable.
The subtractive process was more successful and predecessor of technicolor where coloured images were produced on the celluloid and projected onto the screen using white light.

Cinerama

As mentioned in a previous posting Cinerama is one of the key forms of widescreen introduced in the 1950s, which offered a participatory experience similar to competing recreation including golf and bowling. Cinerama developed a strong relationship with tourism through presenting travelogues, which provided the audience to view different places around the world and encourage travelling. However, the form was problematic in dealing with narrative because the technology could not deal with close-ups and the optical restrictions with focal length limited varying because only lens could be used.

There is an extensive and well written history of cinerama in wikipedia providing a chronological account of the technological developments involved with the forms.

Widescreen Films - A New Experience

The widescreen film became a special theatrical event in the 1950s through three key developments:

• Films being booked as blockbusters to a small number of first-run theatres as opposed to standard distribution.
• The theatres were refurbished creating a more spectacular experience
• The total experience between the widescreen and refurbishment created a form of participatory recreation where the audience were active contributor in the process.

These changes to cinema becoming a theatrical event were significantly important because there was a decline in box office after World War II and a greater emphasis placed on leisure time creating a broader range of competition.

André Bazin who is one of the most influential film critic and theorists distinguished an audience’s participation in theatre and cinema by noting theatre as a live experience requiring an active involvement by the audience whereas, cinema separated the performance space. John Belton in Hollywood in the Age of Television, claims that wide-screen cinema formed a “greater illusion of participation” (Belton, 1990:188). While Bazin argues a valid distinction between theatre and cinema, wide-screen does fit into either active vs. passive audience theory, but introduces a new form of participation by drawing the audience into the “space of the picture” (Belton, 1990:188).

In the 1950s there were four key developments in widescreen:

1. Cinerama
2. Cinemascope
3. Eratz Widescreen
4. Todd-AO
   

John Belton, "Glorious Technicolour, Breathtaking Cinemascope, and Stereophonic Sound" in Tino Balio (ed), Hollywood in the Age of Television (Boston: Unwin, 1990) pp 185-211