I’ve been a fan of movies for as long as I can
remember. Even as a kid I enjoyed other
aspects of cinema than just the story or the Disney songs. I researched great directors and writers and sought
out their filmographies, probably stumbling into genres and movies I shouldn’t
have discovered for a couple of years until my pre-pubescent mind could
understand the themes and symbolism.
However, I’ve also been a proponent of keeping the history
of film at the forefront of moviegoer’s minds.
When I watch a movie with my wife or friends, I try to make sure that
any homages to earlier movies or references in general to the industry are
known so that they too can understand what the filmmakers are attempting to
convey to the audience.
So that is the general purpose of this post. It is one man’s opinion of the moments in
American film history that bookmarks the progression of cinema. If you have a working knowledge of Hollywood
history, you will probably be able to quickly figure out seven or eight of the
movies I am going to include and the reasons behind said films. Yet, for those of you who don’t care as much
as I do about movies and really only go to the theater to be entertained, hopefully
this will enlighten you a bit.
It should be noted, not all of the films below invented or
were the first to do whatever in their field.
What makes these films special is that they were the first to bring
their techniques to an American audience or improve upon what was already established.
1903
The Great Train
Robbery
I’m pretty confident that if you haven’t enrolled in a
history of cinema course you’re likely not to have heard of this film. It is an 11-minute one-reel Western that is
among the first to tell a narrative story.
Written, produced, and directed by Edwin S. Porter, what makes The Great Train Robbery such a milestone
film is the number of unconventional technics it used, including composite
editing, on-location shooting, frequent camera movement, cross cutting, and, in
some prints, the use of color.
As well as the above mentioned notes that make The Great Train Robbery the classic it
is, it should also be noted that the final shot of the picture is an iconic
moment. The leader of the bandits,
played by Justus D. Barnes, is shown in a close up, emptying his pistol at the
audience. As the legend goes, moviegoers
who saw this for the first time ducked in their seats to avoid being “shot.”
The Great Train
Robbery was selected for preservation in the United States National Film
Registry by the Library of Congress in 1990 as being “culturally, historically,
or aesthetically significant.”
1915
The Birth of a Nation
Not to be confused with an upcoming period drama that will
most definitely be an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture (and possibly a
strong contender to win due to the recent diversity backlash the Oscars went through
this past year), this silent epic drama was directed by D. W. Griffith and
starred Lillian Gish, who was dubbed the First Lady of American Cinema. By today’s standards this film would never
see a public release and is pretty much considered to be a Ku Klux Klan
propaganda film, but at the time of its release it was the first 12-reel
picture in America. The film is more
than two hours long and included an intermission. It also spawned the first ever sequel, The Fall of a Nation, believed to now be
a lost film.
Although a commercial success, grossing the highest box
office return in film history until 1939’s Gone
with the Wind, The Birth of a Nation
was highly controversial and the NAACP unsuccessfully attempted to have the
film banned. The widespread protests of
African-Americans who were upset at the portrayal of black men, with some
played by white men in blackface, as unintelligent and sexually aggressive
toward white women led Griffith to film another landmark film, Intolerance.
The advanced techniques and groundbreaking storytelling have
kept The Birth of a Nation an
influential and significant piece of American cinema history. In 1992, the movie was selected to the
National Film Registry for preservation.
1927
The Jazz Singer
It has been revealed that approximately 70-75 percent of all
silent films are considered to be lost.
Since the advent of “talkies,” the number of films to have disappeared
has dropped substantially. Yet, that
really doesn’t have anything to do with the technological breakthrough The Jazz Singer provided.
Since the release of the Al Jolson-starring musical, the
first to include a handful of synchronized dialogue sequences, the decline of
the silent film era began and production studios slowly scrambled to keep up
with the advent of “talking” pictures.
While it may sound absurd to audience members today and despite its
tremendous profits at the box office, studio heads didn’t believe in the fad of
sound.
Directed by Alan Crosland, The Jazz Singer featured six audible songs performed by Jolson, a
rebellious Jewish man who defies his family’s traditions on the road to success
as a jazz singer. The film won a special
Academy Award for its technological breakthrough and received additional
nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, from Samson Raphaelson’s short story
“The Day of Atonement,” and Best Engineering Effects. It was ineligible for the two Best Picture
categories at the time, titled Outstanding Picture, Production and the Unique
and Artistic Production, as Academy members felt it would have been unfair
competition for the nominated silent pictures.
Like Griffith’s The
Birth of a Nation, today’s audiences would balk at the social tone-deafness
of Jolson donning blackface. However, at
the time of its release audiences were hysterical with the arrival of sound and
dialogue. The film has been selected for
preservation in the U.S. Library of Congress’s National Film Registry and in
1998.
On a side note, the reason “talkies” have fared better than
silent films in being protected is the creation of a more enduring film stock
beginning in 1950 and an increase in awareness of film preservation.
1939
Wizard of Oz
It’s not the first in Hollywood history to utilize
color. It isn’t even the first to use
Technicolor, a major color process invented in 1916. Despite this, most people think 1939’s The Wizard of Oz is known for being one
of the earliest hit films to use Technicolor, but even that is misleading
because the now-classic musical was a financial failure upon its initial
release. It wasn’t until subsequent
re-releases a decade later and the continual television broadcasting that led
to its wide-spread popularity.
Prior to the release of The
Wizard of Oz in 1939, MGM had switched to a three-strip color process in
1935, with only approximately 25 pictures having been completed using this new
method of filming.
The most logical reason for the connection between the Judy
Garland-starring fantasy film and Technicolor is the story-telling technique of
using black-and-white photography to bookend the film with the color sequences
found when Dorothy is in the land of Oz.
Even an element of L. Frank Baum’s original story was changed in order
to exploit the technical capabilities of shooting in color. Baum’s silver shoes are altered to ruby red
for the film. It also helps that the
film is chock-full of sing-along songs and quotable lines found in hundreds of
other films, television programs, songs, and books.
Although a box office flop at the time, The Wizard of Oz did garner two Oscar statuettes (Best Song for
“Over the Rainbow” and Best Original Score) and four other nominations,
including Best Picture. Judy Garland
also won a special Academy Juvenile Award for “Best Performances by a Juvenile”
due to her work in this film and Babes in
Arms.
The movie was a first-year selection to the
National Film Registry in 1989 for preservation.
1941
Citizen Kane
If you have even a fleeting interest in filmmaking, you’ve
likely heard that Citizen Kane is the
greatest film of all time. While that is
probably a worthwhile debate to have as to the merits of whether Orson Welles’
masterpiece is truly the greatest piece of cinematic offering ever to be shown
in theaters, a more accurate, and less controversial, stance would be to say Citizen Kane is the most influential
film of all time.
In a nutshell, there is a substantial difference in the way
a movie looks prior to this 1941 classic and after. While Welles didn’t necessarily invent any of
the techniques utilized in his directorial debut, he was the first to bring
them all together in one movie and perfect the medium.
We will begin with something most modern audience members
wouldn’t even ponder could have been a real option in the early stages of
cinema: the end credits. Before Citizen Kane hit theaters, the cast
members and moviemakers were listed at the beginning of the film, prior to any
action or dialogue. The credits would be
listed in a special font and artwork was provided to give an idea of what the
tone of the movie was about, but moviegoers had to sit through the credits
right after the previews. While film
crews were much smaller back then and it didn’t take near as long as it does
now to list all those involved in the making of the movie, imagine sitting
through the entire credits, not to see some sneak peek minute-long vignette
teasing an upcoming sequel or cinematic universe companion scene, but just to
start the feature you paid to see.
Other techniques perfected by Welles include storytelling
(telling Kane’s story in flashback as opposed to the traditional linear,
chronological narrative; multiple narrators recounting Kane’s life, sometimes
inaccurately), cinematography (use of deep focus; low-angle shots; ceilings
being built on set), sound (overlapping dialogue; sound perspectives to create
the illusion of distance; lightning-mix, which linked complex montage sequences
together with a series of related sounds or phrases), lighting, and long takes.
All that is a long winded way to say that Citizen Kane provided a new tradition of
making films that has been upheld for the past 55 years. The National Film Registry included the movie in its inaugural class of 1989.
1993
Jurassic Park
It might seem like jumping more than 50 years without any kind of
advancement in technology, storytelling, or another cinematic element seems disingenuous
to the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s filmmakers, but that truly is not the
case. There were some seminal moments in
film history during that period, including the threat of television prompting
studios to use visual gimmicks like widescreen methods and 3D films to get
audiences back in theaters, the abolition of the Hays Code, the influence of French
New Wave cinema, and a new era of filmmakers who had been taught their craft in
a classroom as opposed to on-the-job training like their predecessors. However, the scientific advancements that have
been made from computers have had an enormous impact on Hollywood and that is
what will be focused on in the final four cinematic moments of medium development.
Possibly the greatest innovation in filmmaking is the use of
computer graphics, or CGI, for improving visual effects. Prior to Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, cinematic monsters, make-believe
creatures, and long-dead species had to be created with stop-motion videos,
animation, miniature models, and blue screen technology (the precursor to the
green screen). Another “special effects”
technique prior to computers was editing, which included double exposure, split
screens, dissolves, and fades, but after Spielberg achieved a
believable-looking dinosaur with computer technology it was no longer necessary
to fool audiences with dubious film cuts or Claymation trickery.
The use (or over-use in some cases) of computer-enhanced
visual effects has improved by such leaps and bounds over the past two decades
that most audience members cannot even tell when a special effects shot has
been enhanced with CGI. We’ve come so
far with computers that filmmakers who refuse to rely solely on CGI and instead
“do it for real” are garnering more and more support from cinephiles.
CGI effects is a continually improving tool for filmmakers
and it is something that has allowed directors and special effects teams to believably
take audiences places that wasn’t possible prior to Jurassic Park.
1995
Toy Story
If you cannot legally drink alcohol, then it stands to
reason you might not know that prior to your birth, animated movies were drawn
by hand. Yet, that all changed with the
critical and box office darling that started an empire at PIXAR. Toy
Story was the first feature-length film to utilize computer animation
technology to create all of its characters.
From 2010 to 2015, there have been approximately 150
animated films to be produced by an American studio. Of those, 91 were made using CG animation and
41 were drawn traditionally. While
hand-drawn animation certainly isn’t a dead art, it has become second-fiddle to
the abundance of CG animation making its way into mainstream media.
The impact Toy Story
has had is not limited to just film and television either. It also influenced graphic designers in the
way they computed imagery for personal computers, game developers desired to
replicate its animation for video games, and robotic researchers were
interested in building artificial intelligence that was comparable to the film’s
lifelike characters.
In 2005, the Library of Congress included Toy Story in the National Film Registry for preservation.
1999
The Blair Witch
Project
You might think I will be going the route of the found
footage film by listing The Blair Witch
Project, which certainly is a craze that has lasted longer than anyone wanted. Instead, the legacy this film has had on
Hollywood and American filmmaking in general is the way movies are marketed
today.
The Blair Witch
Project is considered to be the first widely released movie to use the Internet
as a marketing tool. According to Wikipedia,
the film’s official website featured fake police reports and “newsreel-style”
interviews that amplified the movie’s found footage device and sparked debate
as to whether the film was a real-life documentary or a fictional work. It also contained footage of actors posing as
police and investigators giving testimony about their casework, and shared
photos of the actors to add a sense of realism.
Even IMDb listed the actors as “missing, presumed dead” for the first
year of the film’s release.
The movie is considered the first to go “Viral” despite its
premiering before the existence of several technologies that help the
spread of such phenomena today.
1999
The Matrix
Like The Blair Witch
Project, including The Matrix
might be a little misleading as to what impact the film had on the movie
industry. You might think I will be
discussing the visual effect known as “bullet time,” which certainly had its
heyday in movies and video games during the 2000s, or the overuse of wire fu
techniques, which is the combination of wire work and kung fu to create
over-the-top fight sequences that defy the laws of gravity and physics. Yet, the truly lasting influence The Matrix has had on Hollywood action
movies is the move toward Eastern approaches to fight sequences.
That may sound similar to wire fu, or even its counterpart
gun fu, but it is more than just that. The
success of The Matrix created a high
demand for choreographers from Hong Kong cinema to simulate fight sequences of
similar complexity. It is rare today to
find an action movie that involves a fight sequence that only involves two men
going toe to toe and trading punches.
Instead, an action sequence must include weapons, both traditional and unconventional,
intricate dance-like movement from the characters, and quick-cut editing (which
was popularized by the Bourne action franchise more than The Matrix).
A little more than a decade after its release, The Matrix was included in the National Film Registry in 2012.
2009
Avatar
The golden era of 3D movies began in 1952, and it wasn’t
even James Cameron who reintroduced audiences to the gimmick, but what Cameron
did do was tell a story and shoot a movie that complimented the use of 3D
instead of prostrating to it in order to make a few dollars more at the box
office.
Beginning in 2003 a resurgence of 3D has been making its way
back into mainstream films, so much so that it’s believed by many that the
market has been oversaturated. And that
oversaturation includes films that have been forced to film in 3D by production
companies in order to charge more to audiences. Yet, Cameron felt so passionate about his
alien action love story that he waited a decade for cinema technology to
advance to the point that it would look as believable as possible.
Prior to Avatar,
audiences didn’t question the necessity of 3D in a movie. If the film was shown in 3D then you simply
enjoyed the spectacle. However, after
Cameron’s film was released, it is now commonplace for people to debate the
validity of whether the 3D gimmick was required and some audience members base screening
reviews on whether they see the 2D or 3D version of a movie.
While James Cameron’s Avatar
hasn’t been very influential in regard to the amount of films being released in
3D, it certainly has been the catalyst for the significance of using the visual
device as a complement to improving the spectacle of a movie.
Honorable Mention:
1975
Jaws
The Avengers, Indiana Jones, E.T., Batman, Captain Kirk and Mr.
Spock. What do all of these characters
have in common? They owe a big thank you
to Steven Spielberg. On June 20, 1975, a
movie was unleashed on audiences that would revolutionize Hollywood’s business
model. With the release of Spielberg’s Jaws, the summer blockbuster was born.
Since 2007, the summer blockbuster season has grossed an
average of $4.321 billion. This is
compared to $1.429 billion for the spring, $1.028 billion in the fall, and
$1.045 billion in the winter. Summer
blockbusters gross more than the three other seasons combined. This does exclude the holiday box office
season, which is defined as the first week of November to the first week of
January. That time period since 2007 has
grossed an average of $2.159 billion.
Big-budgeted action/adventure movies are normally slated for the summer
because that is when most of the dollars are spent on movies. It wasn’t like that until Jaws.
It has had such an impact on the business of Hollywood, Jaws was included in the National Film Registry for preservation in 2001.
1977
Star Wars
The legacy of George Lucas has been tarnished over the
years, but the one thing he can hold on to is he changed science fiction
filmmaking. Prior to Star Wars, sci fi was made up of either
slow-moving operatic think pieces like 2001:
A Space Odyssey and The Day the Earth Stood Still or it was low-budgeted, cheap-looking space adventures in the vein of
Buck Rogers, Forbidden Planet, and Planet of the Apes.
Roger Ebert wrote of the film, “Like The Birth of a Nation and Citizen
Kane, Star Wars was a technical
watershed that influenced many of the movies that came after.” The influence it had was beginning a new generation
of special effects and high-energy motion pictures. It also piggy-backed with Jaws to refocus the industry on
big-budget blockbusters films for younger audiences.
Star Wars was among the first films inducted to the National Film Registry in 1989.
2008
Iron Man
One of the more recent big changes in Hollywood, like PIXAR’s Toy Story, has jumpstarted a production
company, which actually began as a lowly comic book publisher. Iron
Man was the initial wading into new waters by creating a connected
universe of films that didn’t simply tie in from sequel to sequel but laid out
an entire phase (multiple phases now) of movies that build upon one another and
tell an overarching story with multiple heroes.
Marvel’s strategy has been such a success, both critically
and financially, it has spawned other studios and franchises to attempt the
same thing. DC comics has initiated
their cinematic universe. The Universal
monsters, made up of Frankenstein, Dracula, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man,
the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Bride of Frankenstein,
are getting their own universe to interact with one another. Godzilla and King Kong will be meeting up in
a shared universe. Even the Men in Black
and 21 Jump Street franchises have teased a team-up.