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Reading Passage 3
The History of Early Cinema
The history of the cinema in its first thirty years is one of major and, to
this day, unparalleled expansion and growth. Beginning as something unusual in a
handful of big cities – New York, London, Paris and Berlin – the new medium
quickly found its way across the world, attracting larger and larger audiences
wherever it was shown and replacing other forms of entertainment as it did so.
As audiences grew, so did the places where films were shown, finishing up with
the ‘great picture palaces’ of the 1920s, which rivalled, and occasionally
superseded, theatres and opera-houses in terms of opulence and splendour.
Meanwhile, films themselves developed from being short ‘attractions’ only a
couple of minutes long, to the full-length feature that has dominated the
world’s screens up to the present day.
Although French, German, American and British pioneers have all been credited
with the invention of cinema, the British and the Germans played a relatively
small role in its world-wide exploitation. It was above all the French, followed
closely by the Americans, who were the most passionate exporters of the new
invention，helping to start cinema in China，Japan，Latin America and Russia. In
terms of artistic development it was again the French and the Americans who took
the lead, though in the years before the First World War, Italy, Denmark and
Russia also played a part.
In the end, it was the United States that was to become, and remain, the
largest single market for films. By protecting their own market and pursuing a
vigorous export policy, the Americans achieved a dominant position on the world
market by the start of the First World War. The centre of film-making had moved
westwards, to Hollywood, and it was films from these new Hollywood studios that
flooded onto the world s film markets in the years after the First World War,
and have done so ever since. Faced with total Hollywood domination, few film
industries proved competitive. The Italian industry, which had pioneered the
feature film with spectacular films like Quo vadis? (z913) and Cabiria (I9z4),
almost collapsed. In Scandinavia, the Swedish cinema had a brief period of
glory, notably with powerful epic films and comedies. Even the French cinema
found itself in a difficult position. In Europe, only Germany proved
industrially capable, while in the new Soviet Union and in Japan the development
of the cinema took place in conditions of commercial isolation.
Hollywood took the lead artistically as well as industrially. Hollywood films
appealed because they had better-constructed narratives, their special effects
were more impressive, and the star system added a new dimension to screen
acting. If Hollywood did not have enough of its own resources, it had a great
deal of money to buy up artists and technical innovations from Europe to ensure
its continued dominance over present or future competition.
The rest of the world survived partly by learning from Hollywood and partly
because audiences continued to exist for a product which corresponded to needs
which Hollywood could not supply. As well as popular audiences, there were also
increasing audiences for films which were artistically more adventurous or which
dealt with the issues in the outer world.
None of this would have happened without technology, and cinema is in fact
unique as an art form. In the early years, this art form was quite primitive,
similar to the original French idea of using a lantern and slides back in the
seventeenth century. Early cinema programmes were a mixture of items, combining
comic sketches, free-standing narratives, serial episodes and the occasional
trick or animated film. With the arrival of the feature-length narrative as the
main attraction, other types of films became less important. The making of
cartoons became a separate branch of film-making, generally practised outside
the major studios, and the same was true of serials. Together with newsreels,
they tended to be shown as short items in a programme which led to the
feature.
From early cinema, it was only American slapstick comedy that successfully
developed in both short and feature format. However, during this ‘Silent Film’
era, animation, comedy, serials and dramatic features continued to thrive, along
with factual films or documentaries, which acquired an increasing
distinctiveness as the period progressed. It was also at this time that the
avant-garde film first achieved commercial success, this time thanks almost
exclusively to the French and the occasional German film.
Of the countries which developed and maintained distinctive national cinemas
in the silent period, the most important were France, Germany and the Soviet
Union. Of these, the French displayed the most continuity, in spite of the war
and post-war economic uncertainties. The German cinema, relatively insignificant
in the pre-war years, exploded on to the world scene after 1919. Yet even they
were both overshadowed by the Soviets after the I917 Revolution. They turned
their back on the past, leaving the style of the pre-war Russian cinema to the
emigres who fled westwards to escape the Revolution.
The other countries whose cinemas changed dramatically are: Britain, which
had an interesting but undistinguished history in the silent period; Italy,
which had a brief moment of international fame just before the war; the
Scandinavian countries, particularly Denmark, which played a role in the
development of silent cinema quite out of proportion to their small population;
and Japan, where a cinema developed based primarily on traditional theatrical
and, to a lesser extent, other art forms and only gradually adapted to western
influence.
Questions 28-30
Choose THREE letters A-F.
Write your answers in boxes 28-30 on your answer sheet.
Which THREE possible reasons for American dominance of the film industry are
given in the text?
A plenty of capital to purchase what it didn’t have
B making films dealing with serious issues
C being first to produce a feature film
D well-written narratives
E the effect of the First World War
F excellent special effects
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