The Oxford History of World Cinema (28 page)

early as 1914 industrialists such as Krupp's Alfred Hugenberg realized the positive

advantages to be gained by film as a medium of political influence. Hugenberg, later to

control Universum-Film AG (Ufa), formed the Deutsche Lichtbild Gesellschaft,

effectively provoking competing representatives from the electrical and chemical

industries to forge an alliance with the government. In a grand plan secretly orchestrated

by General Ludendorff and partially financed by the government, existing companies

such as Messter, Union, and Nordisk were purchased and reorganized in 1917 into Ufa,

which overnight became Germany's most important producer, distributor, and exhibitor of

films. Government and industrial capital, the new markets provided by territorial conquest

and Nordisk's rights, and an acute awareness of film's propaganda potential, all in a

virtually competition-free environment, led to continued theatre construction and

increased film production until the end of the war.

The experience of the Russian film industry until the government's collapse in 1917

appeared somewhat closer to the German than the Allied model. With a pre-war

dependence on imports for up to 90 per cent of its films, war-related transportation

problems, and declining production levels among its French, British, and Italian trading

partners, the Russian industry had to fend for itself. Toeplitz ( 1987) claims that by 1916,

despite difficult economic conditions, domestic production levels reached some 500 films.

Under these circumstances, the Russian market, characterized by among other things its

demands for films with tragic endings and a high degree of formal stasis, helped to

develop a distinctly national cinema as evident in the work of Yevgeny Bauer and Yakov

Protazanov. From late 1917 onwards, however, the Bolshevik revolution and the civil war

which followed it, together with extreme privation in many parts of the nation,

temporarily halted the progress of the film industry.

The war, regardless of its impact on the various national cinemas, encouraged a series of

common developments. Film played an explicit role in shaping public sentiments towards

the conflict and in informing the public of the war's progress. From Chaplin's The Bond

( 1918) or Griffith's Hearts of the World ( 1918) to
The Universal Animated Weekly
or

Annales de guerre
, film served the interests of the State, and in so doing demonstrated its

'good citizenship'. Such demonstrations of civic responsibility helped to placate the film

industry's lingering enemies from the pre-war era -- concerned clergy, teachers, and

citizens who perceived motion pictures as a threat to established cultural values -- and to

reassure those progressive reformers who held high hopes for film as a medium with

uplifting potentials. National governments and the military, too, took an active role in the

production and often regulation of film. Germany's BUFA (Bild- und Film Amt), the

USA's Committee on Public Information, Britain's Imperial War Office, and France's

Service
Photographique et Cinématographique de l'Armée
variously controlled

photographic access to the front, produced military and medical training films, and

commissioned propaganda films for the public. And, legitimizing strategies aside, tent

cinemas on the front and warm theatres in European cities short of fuel drew new

audiences to the motion picture. In this regard, the unusually high levels of organization

and support provided by the German government to BUFA and Ufa were matched by its

efforts on the front, with over 900 temporary soldiers' cinemas.

A scene from
Maudite soit la guerre
('A curse on war'), a pacifist drama made for Pathé's Belgian subsidiary by Alfred

Machin in 1913, and released just before the outbreak of the War in 1914

Europe's first major military conflict in the modern era obviously proved attractive as a

motion picture subject, as the rapid development of atrocity and war films in each of the

combatant nations suggests. These films often cut across existing forms, as Chaplin's

Shoulder Arms ( 1918), Winsor McKay's animated The Sinking of the Lusitania ( 1918),

and Gance's
J'accuse
(I Accuse, 1919) attest. And the interest both in the new war genre

and in explorations of the horrors and heroism of the First World War continued well

beyond it, from Vidor's The Big Parade ( 1925) and Walsh's What Price Glory ( 1926), to

Kubrick's Paths of Glory ( 1957). Beyond permeating the period's realist films, often in as

muted a form as character reference, it would echo particularly loudly during the

economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when reappraisal of the war could

serve the causes of pacifism ( Milestone's 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front and

Renoir's 1937 La Grande Illusion) or militarism ( Ucicky's 1933
Morgenrot
('Dawn')).

The war, then, served not only to dismantle Europe's dominant pre-war industries, but,

ironically, to construct a tacit consensus regarding the national importance of cinema. The

latter point underwent a curious permutation which assisted the US penetration of markets

such as England, France, and Italy, and meanwhile stimulated the distinctive national

identities of the German and Russian cinemas. As the specifically 'national' character of

the European allies' cinema became increasingly associated with the gruelling war effort

and pre-war national identities, the US cinema increasingly appeared as a morale booster

and harbinger of a new internationalism. Chaplin's appeal to French children, workers,

and intellectuals alike outlined the trajectory which American feature films would follow

by the war's end, as US films served the cultural functions of social unification and

entertainment while expressing the emphatically modern Zeitgeist of the post-war era.

The German experience differed considerably. The perceived cultural distinctions which

in part provoked the war and which lurked behind the government's active support of Ufa

would continue to drive the film industry in the post-war era. Although US film

penetration of the German market increased until late in 1916, the taste for American

product acquired by the French, British, and Italians failed to take hold. And the post-war

Aufbruch, or break with the past, also failed to resonate with the cultural values of the

USA, at least as manifest in its films. The late date of US resumption of trade with

Germany, and the extremity of German inflation (which led to an exchange rate of over 4

trillion marks to the dollar in 1923) effectively precluded US interest in the film market

and prolonged Germany's isolation. National cultural needs would be met by national film

production. The Russian situation, although quite different and compounded by a

lingering civil war and economic boycott, shared the same basic dynamic as a

revolutionary culture set out to produce its own revolutionary films.

Europe emerged from the war ridden by debt (mostly to the USA) and physically

traumatized. France, Italy, and Germany faced the additional ordeals of social unrest,

political turmoil, severe inflation, and an influenza epidemic which swept across Europe

killing more people than the war itself. With the exception of Germany, where the film

industry enjoyed relative stability, Europe's motion picture business emerged from the war

in a state of shock. For example, its sometimes successful attempts to produce films

notwithstanding, the French industry turned increasingly to distribution, while Italy

attempted to return to the glories of the spectacle film, but found that international taste

had changed considerably. As the leaders of the pre-war industry attempted to shake off

several years of relative inactivity and re-enter the world of production and international

distribution, they found conditions very much changed by the American studios. The

linkage of big-budget features, new studio technologies and production practices,

expensive stars, and the consequent need to assure investors of large international markets

was difficult to break, especially in the face of ravaged domestic economies and a still

splintered and impoverished Europe. America, by contrast, came out of the war with a

massive and relatively healthy domestic market, and an aggressive and well-oiled studio

system. Moderately sensitive to the needs of the foreign market, and armed with an

international infrastructure of shipping, banking, and film offices, the US industry was in

a position to enjoy the post-war shift in the balance of power. Although the weakened film

industries of several European nations attempted to have protective tariffs erected, such

efforts initially had little effect since the American studios could simply exploit the

advantages of the USA's diplomatic and financial power and block legislation.

But the triumph of American films in the post-war period also reflects the changed

position of cinema within the cultural hierarchy, and, in turn, the broader fabric of cultural

transformations which helped give rise to and took form through the war. The often brutal

disruption of lives, families, work, and values served to shatter lingering nineteenth-

century sensibilities. The differences between Sennett's conception of comedy and Harold

Lloyd's, or between Mary Pickford's embodiment of feminine identity and Theda Bara's,

or between the value systems of The Birth of a Nation ( 1915) and DeMille's
Male and

Female
( 1919), suggest the dimensions of the change that had occurred within sectors of

the American public.

An emphatic break with (and often critique of) the past and a self-conscious embrace of

the modern characterized the post-war scene. But the 'modern' itself was a vexed category.

Post-war Europe quickly defined the modern within an older, élitist, and highly

intellectualized aesthetic sensibility, as the institutional histories of the various '-isms' in

painting, music, and avant-garde film suggest. But the modern as manifest in American

mass culture, and nowhere more apparent than in the Hollywood feature, embodied

democratic appeal, instant gratification, and seamless illusionism. The promise of a

readymade, one-size-fits-all culture reinforced the economic inroads made by the US film

industry in Europe, evident in the rise to western dominance of what has been dubbed the

classical Hollywood cinema. In contrast to a European modernism predicated upon the

self-conscious use of image and cutting patterns, Hollywood's modernism inhered in the

industrialized creation of products driven by the project of telling stories as efficiently and

transparently as possible, deploying such techniques as 'invisible editing' to that end.

Although these divergent senses of the modern would fuel endless cultural debates, the

post-war dominance experienced by the US film industry and the persistence throughout

the west of the signifying practices associated with Hollywood would characterize the

decades to come.

Bibliography

Abel, Richard ( 1984), French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929.

Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), The Classical Hollywood

Cinema.

Cherchi Usai, Paolo, and Codelli, Lorenzo ( 1990). Before Caligari.

Koszarski, Richard ( 1990), An Evening's Entertainment.

Monaco, Paul ( 1976), Cinema and Society.

Reeves, Nicholas ( 1986), Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War.

Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), Exporting Entertainment.