By Charlie Keil, Ben Singer
It was once throughout the children that filmmaking really got here into its personal. Studios migrated to the West Coast, setting up a connection among moviemaking and the exoticism of Hollywood. The essays in American Cinema of the 1910s discover the speedy advancements of the last decade that begun with D. W. Griffith s unequalled one-reelers. by way of mid-decade, multi-reel function motion pictures have been profoundly reshaping the and deluxe theaters have been outfitted to draw the broadest attainable viewers. Stars like Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks grew to become extremely important and corporations all started writing high-profile contracts to safe them. With the outbreak of worldwide conflict I, the political, financial, and business foundation used to be laid for American cinema's worldwide dominance. through the tip of the last decade, filmmaking had develop into a real undefined, entire with vertical integration, effective specialization and standardization of practices, and self-regulatory organizations.
Some of the flicks mentioned during this quantity are: The Lonedale Operator, site visitors in Souls, The Perils of Pauline, The start of a country, The Cheat, Intolerance, and female and male.
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Additional info for American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations (The Screen Decades Series)
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Titles currently viewable outside of archives. A full history would want to correct this imbalance, but one-reel films from the pre-feature era remain difficult enough to see under any circumstances, and so I have chosen titles to discuss below mainly from among those available on video. It is compensation that, this year at least, Griffith’s films are unrivaled in stylistic sophistication, if not in their range of subjects. Some of the year’s most fascinating films are in a genre that doesn’t have a precise name: docudramas of social reform, melodramatic reflections of the concerns of the Progressive Era, such as Griffith’s Simple Charity, which contrasts “the red tape” of reform societies with an impoverished 34 SCOTT SIMMON Dorothy West (in shawl, foreground) on Rivington Street, Manhattan, in A Child of the Ghetto.
While commentators feared the influence of moviegoing on young women, a few pointed out how women might be influencing motion pictures. As Bertha Richardson suggested in her revision of The Woman Who Spends: A Study of Her Economic Function, women were a growing force in “the economics of consumption, otherwise known as the spending of their money” (21). The nickels from new audiences added up, and the year saw active, heroic female leads take the screen. 1910 — MOVIES, REFORM, AND NEW WOMEN ■■■■■■■■■■ 33 New Heroines By this time, film audiences had already grown accustomed to genres— relatively formulized plot patterns.
They can watch them without the exciting effects of other forms of diversion” (“Pictures to Soothe Insane”). A screen was installed for bored commuters in Pittsburgh’s central railroad station, with films changed daily, if subjected to one bit of censorship: “‘There will be no pictures of train robberies,’ said Albert Swinehart, who is in charge of the Pennsylvania Railroad detectives, ‘nor of train wrecks. It would leave a bad impression on the minds of the travelers’” (“Films for Commuters”). At nickelodeons, moviegoers came to know on which days of the week new films from their favorite companies were shown; the most popular were from Vitagraph and Biograph.