HNC Photography, IFC - Coursework, Introduction to Film Culture Blog, Part three - Fact or fiction? Truth or lies?, Project 2 - The birth of propaganda
IFC – Exercise 3.3
This first part of section 3 has been and interesting journey to a part of cinema I have not given much thought to previously. The only early cinema I have watched previously was the silent films of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and others.
Reflecting back to these early days you can see that the origin of cinema was not fiction but documentaries. As cinema as an art grew, it became a medium for filmmakers to be put forward their idea to the public as a whole. It was used to a political tool especially around the First World War and the recovery afterward. It does not feel though as represents the people opinions, more the particular filmmaker’s idea of what we want to see – not always political a hasten to add.
There were vast changes in the style of this time with the birth of editing and narrative style, and there is a more risqué film to many of the films in comparison to only a few years later when they were under the confines of the Hayes Code. That is not that the films were openly explicit, just a little more “grown-up,” compared to the movies of the post-WW2 war era, that sometimes became pastiches of themselves by trying to be sensational.
In its earliest days cinema was a spectacle and over the first quarter of a century, it moves through many stages from spectacle through informative to narrative entertainment. However, spectacle remained in these early days as I have commented in “The Birth of a Nation” perhaps it was the spectacle of seeing a sprawling three-hour narrative – lead to the fact that such a grossly racist, historically inaccurate film could become the world first blockbuster?
The early days of cinema were a place for artistic endeavor; it is silly to ask the question where would be today, but they did just push the envelope quickly. Has any art form gone through as large and fast development as cinema did it is early years? I doubt it.
The biggest thing this I take from silent cinema is its ability to experiment and change quickly. What I don’t like it that it was very much telling me what I should be watching and what I should be thinking. In the modern world we can balance this with other media, but in 1915 I might have believed that “the Birth of a Nation” was historically correct.