Old Hollywood

Classical Hollywood Cinema

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 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. Visually, early narrative films had adapted little from the stage, and their narratives had adapted very little from vaudeville and melodrama. 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 David W. 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.

In the world generally and America specifically, the influence of Griffith on film-making was unmatched. Equally influential were his actors in adapting their performances to the new medium. Lillian Gish, the star of The Mothering Heart, is particularly noted for her influence on screen performance techniques. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation was groundbreaking for film as a means of storytelling — a masterpiece of literary narrative with numerous innovative visual techniques. The film initiated so many advances in American cinema that it was rendered obsolete within a few years. Though 1913 was a global landmark for film-making, 1917 was primarily an American one.

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