Cinema of the United States 美国电影产业
2012-08-22 20:59阅读：
Cinema of the United
States
美国电影产业
The cinema of the United States, often generally referred to as
Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world
since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated
into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood
cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period. While the
Lumiere Brothers are generally credited with the birth of modern
cinema, it is undisputably American cinema that soon became the
most dominant force in an emerging industry. Since the 1920s, the
American film industry has grossed more money every year than that
of any other country.
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of
photography to capture motion. In 1894, the world's first
commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City,
using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The United States was in the
forefront of sound film development in the following decades. Since
the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been
based in and around Hollywood, Los Angeles, California.Picture
City, FL was also a planned site for a movie picture production
center in the 1920s, but due to the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, the
idea collapsed and Picture City returned to its original name of
Hobe Sound. Director D. W. Griffith was central to the development
of film grammar.Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently
cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of all time. American
screen actors like John Wayneand Marilyn Monroe have become iconic
figures, while producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in
both animated film and moviemerchandising. The major film studios
of Hollywood are the primary source of the most commercially
successful movies in the world, such as Gone with the Wind (1939),
Star Wars (1977), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009). Today,
American film studios collectively generate several hundred movies
every year, making the United States the third most prolific
producer of films in the world.
History
Origins
The second recorded instance of photographs capturing and
reproducing motion was a series of photographs of a running horse
by Eadweard Muybridge, which he captured in Palo Alto, California,
using a set of still cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's
accomplishment led inventors everywhere to attempt to make similar
devices that would capture such motion. In the United States,
Thomas Edison was among the first to produce such a device, the
kinetoscope, whose heavy-handed patent enforcement caused early
filmmakers to look for alternatives.
In the earliest days of the American film industry, New York
played a role. The Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, built during
the silent film era, was used by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields.
Chelsea, Manhattan was also frequently used. Mary Pickford, an
Academy Award winning actress, shot some of her early films in this
area. Other major centers of film production also included Chicago,
Florida, California, and Cuba.
The film patents wars of the early 20th century led to the
spread of film companies across the U.S. Many worked with equipment
for which they did not own the rights, and thus filming in New York
could be dangerous; it was close to Edison's Company headquarters,
and to agents the company set out to seize cameras. By 1912, most
major film companies had set up production facilities in Southern
California near or in Los Angeles because of the location's
proximity to Mexico, as well as the region's favorable year-round
weather.
Rise of Hollywood
In early 1910, director D.W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph
Company to the west coast with his acting troupe, consisting of
actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel
Barrymore, and others. They started filming on a vacant lot near
Georgia Street in downtown Los Angeles. While there, the company
decided to explore new territories, traveling several miles north
to Hollywood, a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the
movie company filming there. Griffith then filmed the first movie
ever shot in Hollywood, In Old California, a Biograph melodrama
about California in the 19th century, when it belonged to Mexico.
Biograph stayed there for months and made several films before
returning to New York. After hearing about Biograph's success in
Hollywood, in 1913 many movie-makers headed west to avoid the fees
imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making
process. In Los Angeles, California, the studios and Hollywood
grew. Before World War I, movies were made in several U.S. cities,
but filmmakers gravitated to southern California as the industry
developed. They were attracted by the mild climate and reliable
sunlight, which made it possible to film movies outdoors
year-round, and by the varied scenery that was available. There are
several starting points for cinema (particularly American cinema),
but it was Griffith's controversial 1915 epic Birth of a Nation
that pioneered the worldwide filming vocabulary that still
dominates celluloid to this day.
In the early 20th century, when the medium was new, many Jewish
immigrants found employment in the U.S. film industry. They were
able to make their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of
short films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons, after their
admission price of a nickel (five cents). Within a few years,
ambitious men like Samuel Goldwyn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle,
Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers (Harry,
Albert, Samuel, and Jack) had switched to the production side of
the business. Soon they were the heads of a new kind of enterprise:
the movie studio. (It is worth noting that the US had at least one
female director, producer and studio head in these early years,
Alice Guy-Blaché.) They also set the stage for the industry's
internationalism; the industry is often accused of Amero-centric
provincialism.
Other moviemakers arrived from Europe after World War I:
directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and
Jean Renoir; and actors like Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich,
Ronald Colman, and Charles Boyer. They joined a homegrown supply of
actors — lured west from the New York City stage after the
introduction of sound films — to form one of the 20th century's
most remarkable growth industries. At motion pictures' height of
popularity in the mid-1940s, the studios were cranking out a total
of about 400 movies a year, seen by an audience of 90 million
Americans per week.
Sound also became widely used in Hollywood in the late 1920s.
After The Jazz Singer, the first film with synchronized voices, was
successfully released as a Vitaphone talkie in 1927, Hollywood film
companies would respond to Warner Bros. and begin to use Vitaphone
sound — which Warner Bros. owned until 1928 - in future films. By
May 1928, Electrical Research Product Incorporated (ERPI), a
subsidiary of the Western Electric company, gained a monopoly over
film sound distribution. A side effect of the 'talkies' was that
many actors who had made their careers in silent films suddenly
found themselves out of work, as they often had bad voices or could
not remember their lines. Meanwhile, in 1922, US politicianWill H.
Hays left politics and formed the movie studio boss organization
known as the Motion Pictures Distributors Association of America
(MPDAA). The organization became theMotion Picture Association of
America after Hays retired in 1945.
In the early times of talkies, American studios found that their
sound productions were rejected in foreign-language markets and
even among speakers of other dialects of English. The
synchronization technology was still too primitive for dubbing. One
of the solutions was creating parallel foreign-language versions of
Hollywood films. Around 1930, the American companies opened a
studio in Joinville-le-Pont, France, where the same sets and
wardrobe and even mass scenes were used for different time-sharing
crews. Also, foreign unemployed actors, playwrights and winners of
photogenia contests were chosen and brought to Hollywood, where
they shot parallel versions of the English-language films. These
parallel versions had a lower budget, were shot at night and were
directed by second-line American directors who did not speak the
foreign language. The Spanish-language crews included people like
Luis Buñuel, Enrique Jardiel Poncela, Xavier Cugat and Edgar
Neville. The productions were not very successful in their intended
markets, due to the following reasons:
The lower budgets were
apparent.
