Hollywood Golden Age
| Years active | 1917–1960s |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Major figures | D. W. Griffith, John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford |
| Influences | The Renaissance, Theatrical realism |
Classical Hollywood cinema, classical Hollywood narrative, and classical continuity are terms used in film criticism which designate both a narrative and visual style of film-making which developed in and characterized US American cinema between 1917 and the early 1960s and eventually became the most powerful and pervasive style of film-making worldwide.
For centuries the only visual standard of narrative storytelling was the theatre. Since the first narrative films in the 1890s, filmmakers sought to capture the power and realism of live theatre on the cinema screen. Most of these filmmakers started as directors on the late 19th century stage, and likewise most film actors had roots in vaudeville or theatrical melodramas. Early filmmakers largely failed to recognize both the limitations and the freedom of the new medium. Visually, early narrative films had adapted little from the stage, and their narratives had adapted very little from vaudeville and melodrama. Regardless of any merit they had in the proscenium, these narrative films lost both their power and their realism on the cinematic frame. Melodrama and vaudeville only emphasized the artificiality of film, and likewise stagy visuals on film appeared two-dimensional and static. Before the visual style which would become known as "classical continuity", scenes were filmed in full shot and used carefully choreographed staging to portray plot and character relationships. Cutting was extremely limited, and mostly consisted of close-ups of writing on objects for their legibility.
Though lacking the reality inherent to the stage, film (unlike stage) offers the freedom to manipulate apparent time and space, and thus to create the illusion of realism — that is temporal linearity and spatial continuity. By the early 1910s, filmmaking was beginning to fulfill its artistic potential. In Sweden and Denmark this period would be known as a "Golden Age" of film, in America this artistic change is attributed to filmmakers like Griffith finally breaking the grip of the Edison Trust to make films independent of the manufacturing monopoly. Films worldwide began to noticeably adopt visual and narrative elements which would be found in classical Hollywood cinema. 1913 was a particularly fruitful year for the medium, as pioneering directors from several countries produced masterpieces such as The Mothering Heart (D. W. Griffith), Ingeborg Holm (Victor Sjöström), and L’enfant de Paris (Léonce Perret) that set new standards for film as a form of storytelling.
...
Wikipedia