With the Production Code firmly in place for much of the next thirty years, the Hollywood studios began to entrench their influence on cinematic storytelling through the adoption of conventions and norms that dictated, even if informally, how filmmakers around the world would use this new medium to convey narrative. Critics have come to refer to this dominant tradition of narrative meaning-making as classical storytelling; many of its tenets are still practiced in mainstream contemporary films.
The STudio system and Classical Storytelling
In retrospect, a number of historians and critics have referred to 1939 as Hollywood’s greatest year, due to its large number of bona fide movie classics. In some ways, 1939 represents the peak of the Classic Hollywood Studio System, which has been the most influential force in cinema history. To begin, watch the video at right, which will serve as an overview of the studio system and how it worked.
|
|
Welcome back. The video attempts to tell a Cliff’s Notes version of the story of the studio system – its rise, its peak, and its fall. When we think about cinema as an ‘industry,’ the studio system is really what we mean. The word “Hollywood” has taken on a number of meanings in contemporary culture, but you could do worse than using it as a stand-in for the studio system that dominated from the middle 1920s through the middle 1960s.
The video addresses a number of the fundamental characteristics of the studio system, so I won’t spend a huge amount of time belaboring them here, or repeating ideas unnecessarily. The video should illustrate those ideas in action through its selection of examples from the films themselves. However, I do think it is important to emphasize a few key ideas.
The first is storytelling clarity, which was held up as the most important idea governing the films made during the studio period. Many filmmakers would come along to challenge the studio system’s emphasis on clarity of storytelling (international cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, the New Hollywood period of the late 1960s and 1970s), but for a long period of time, narrative clarity and mainstream American filmmaking were virtually synonymous.
Today, we tend to think of individual filmmakers as having distinct styles and characteristics that make their films unique. A film by Quentin Tarantino, for instance, is easily definable as a Quentin Tarantino film; you could say the same thing about Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Kelly Reichardt, and on and on. However, one thing that made the studio system different was the dominance of group style over individual expression. The filmmakers of the studio system worked together to generally obey and adhere to storytelling norms; nobody went too far out to sea. According to David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, “Hollywood films constitute a fairly coherent aesthetic tradition which sustains individual creation.” In other words, the films of the studio period function almost like an art movement, governed by the same general characteristics and modes of representation. Individual artists stand out, of course, by their own unique application of the principles of the movement, but in general, they adhere to the grand ideas. In terms of art, this is like saying Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne are both French Impressionists, but their own work is different.
In addition to clarity, studio-era films privilege the importance of unity. Inside the narrative films made in the studio period, each individual element contributes to a larger, well-defined whole. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson argue that most studio system films adhere to “the premise of Hollywood story construction: causality, consequence, psychological motivations, the drive toward overcoming obstacles and achieving goals. Character-centered – i.e., personal or psychological – causality is the armature of the classical story.” This means that characters have clearly defined motivations and delineated goals – they want to accomplish something specific, rooted in their psychology. Each scene leads to the next, again, clearly delineated through causality. Each thing that happens in the story causes the next thing to happen. It should all make sense. These works don’t brook disunity: stray elements, scenes that go nowhere, characters that have little purpose—all of these are eliminated.
This privileging of clarity and causality shows up not just in stories themselves, but in how the stories are told. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson again: “This movement from cause to effect, in the service of overarching goals, partly explains why Hollywood so prizes continuity. Coincidence and haphazardly linked events are believed to flaw the film’s unity and disturb the spectator. Tight causality yields not only consequence but continuity, making the film progress ‘smoothly, easily, with no jars, no waits, no delays.’” This emphasis on continuity gives rise to the “invisible style” I mentioned in the video. Here is a general, working definition of what that looked like on the ground, from Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson: “Hollywood’s pride in concealed artistry implies that narration is imperceptible and unobtrusive. Editing must be seamless, camera work ‘subordinated to the fluid thought of the dramatic action.’ Some theorists have called the classical style transparent and illusionist, what theorist Noel Burch has called ‘the zero-degree style of filming.’ This is to say that classical technique is usually motivated compositionally. The chain of cause and effect demands that we see a close-up of an important object or that we follow a character into a room. ‘Invisible’ may suffice as a rough description of how little most viewers notice technique, but it does not get us very far if we want to analyze how classical films work. Such concepts play down the constructed nature of the style; a transparent effect does not encourage us to probe beneath the surface.”
In general, during the studio era, filmmakers followed some traditional conventions for covering narrative action with the camera. According to Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, “At the scene’s start, the classical paradigm offers two ways of establishing the space: immediate or gradual. The narration may begin with a long shot that establishes the total space; this is by far the most common method. […] Or the narration may begin the scene by showing only a portion of the space – a character, an object, a detail of décor, a doorway. In this alternative, the scene will begin by framing a detail and then by means of various devices (dissolve, cut, iris, or tracking shot) will soon reveal the totality of the space. The establishing shot is simply delayed, seldom eliminated.” This is the basic process: wide shots that show an entire room, before cutting in to medium shots that bring the camera closer to the characters, and then finally moving into close-ups as the scenes move towards emotional climaxes.
Classical Storytelling in action
The easiest way to see this is in Hollywood films’ reliance on match-action cutting. The concept is pretty easy to understand, and as viewers, we have been conditioned visually to accept this technique at a subconscious level. Here’s how it works: a character performs a simple action in one shot, and then the cut to a new shot occurs during the action, disguising the edit by matching the movement of the actor. In essence, the idea is to get you not to notice the cut, but maintain focus instead on the performer. Here’s an example of a pair of shots, joined at the action, from Vincent Sherman's The Damned Don't Cry (1950). In the shot on the left, Martin (Kent Smith) moves to the left side of the frame, and in shot two, the film cuts back to a wider shot as he moves in the same direction, sitting down at the desk.
Filmmakers employ other strategies during the Classic Hollywood period that also help develop a smooth relationship between the spectators and the film itself. For example, shots that don’t have a joining action are sometimes linked through eyeline matches. In this pair of shots from Berlin Express (1948, Dir. Jacques Tourneur), Robert (Robert Ryan) stands on a train car, smoking a cigarette. He looks up, off-screen left, and the next shot is a cut to what he sees, another man entering the train car. The edit is smoothed over by a conceptual relationship between the two characters—though we have not seen them together in the same shot, we understand that they are in the same location because of the eyeline match.
One of the most dominant patterns of shot coverage is the shot/reverse shot pattern used to cover dialogue sequences. When characters sit down to have a conversation, nearly all films in the Classic Hollywood studio era will rely on this simple technique that still dominates today. Eyeline matters a lot here, shaping the ways in which we perceive where the characters are placed in the space: “If a single eyeline provides a strong spatial cue, then a second eyeline on the other side of the cut should create an even stronger spatial anchor for the spectator. This principle is commonly used to create the shot/reverse shot (SRS) schema, one of the most prevalent figures in the classical Hollywood cinema’s spatial system.” Again, today, we process shot/reverse shot patterns without thinking about them, but it is valuable to call attention to how they work, because they can be manipulated for emotional effect. Here is a typical example from The Great Sinner (1949, Dir. Robert Siodmak), between Fedja (Gregory Peck) and Pauline (Ava Gardner).
Editor Walter Murch, who worked on The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979), both directed by Francis Ford Coppola, helpfully explains how this process can work. Murch argues that editing can control how audiences perceive characters: “For instance, by cutting away from a certain character before he finishes speaking, I might encourage the audience to think only about the face value of what he said. On the other hand, if I linger on the character after he finishes speaking, I allow the audience to see, from the expression in his eyes, that he is probably not telling the truth, and they will think differently about him and what he said. But since it takes a certain amount of time to make that observation, I cannot cut away from the character too early: Either I cut away while he is speaking (branch number one) or I hold until the audience realizes he is lying (branch number two), but I cannot cut in between those two branches—to do so would either seem too long or not long enough.” Editing is about rhythm—noticing how studio filmmakers do it, which became the standard practice, is an important first step.
The word ‘Classic’ (or ‘Classical’) is important. We tend to think of ‘classic’ as conferring a kind of essential status on an individual work (“that film is a classic,” we say), but in this context, ‘Classic’ refers to the dominant discourse. When we say the “Classic Hollywood Studio System,” we are acknowledging the degree to which the methods its filmmakers employed came to be the standard operating procedure. Now, many filmmakers came along later who challenged those approaches, but they are reacting against something that is firmly entrenched. Their choices are almost always judged, fairly or not, against the standard methods of filmmaking that Hollywood established during the studio period.
Stars and the system
Movie stars are essential to any understanding of Classic Hollywood. Though it is quite common today for audiences to know who directors and even screenwriters are, helped in no small part by social media presences, in the studio period, most viewers fell in love with the movie stars who appeared on the screen, and knew very little about the artists working behind the scenes.
This was quite uncommon in the Classic Hollywood period, as stars most often played roles that bore at least some resemblance to those that they had played in the past. The idea was to create, and then protect, a screen persona that audiences could easily associate with the performer—this guaranteed a certain kind of film to an audience, working in some ways like genre.
Over time, genres and stardom change considerably. Though the gangster genre and James Cagney were more or less synonymous in the early part of the 1930s, the actor had worked hard to distance himself from the psychopathic roles he had played as a young man in the intervening years, making fewer and fewer gangster films, often stepping onto the other side of the law to play a lawman instead, as he did in 1935’s G-Men (Dir. William Keighley) or an innocent newspaper reporter framed by gangsters and sent to jail for a crime he did not commit in Each Dawn I Die (1939, Dir. William Keighley). In both cases, Cagney was seeking to complicate his on screen image, just as he did in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938, Dir. Michael Curtiz), in which his gangster Rocky Sullivan pretends to be terrified to be executed in the electric chair so that the young boys who idolize him will stop thinking of him as a hero. For much of the 1940s, Cagney left the gangster film behind entirely.
The clip at right from G-Men illustrates just how far Cagney wanted to move from his early gangster roles, especially Tom Powers of The Public Enemy (1931, Wellman), which more than any other film had made him a star. Watch the scene, in which Cagney’s character, Brick Davis, a lawyer seeking to join the FBI to fight crime, stands up for himself against the skepticism of his superior officer, who thinks he is a criminal spy because of where he grew up.
|
|
Richard Dyer’s book Stars is the essential text to read in order to understand how movie stardom works on screen. He analyzes how stars carry meaning, and is careful to remind us that “stars did not absolutely guarantee the success of a film. Stars move in and out of favor, and even at the height of their popularity may make a film that nobody much goes to see.” Dyer also acknowledges the importance of stars from a marketing perspective, emphasizing that stardom is entirely generated out of thin air—it is fabricated. This was especially true in the Classic Hollywood period, when stars often adopted new names and had dramatic backstories exaggerated or even outright invented for them by the studios, who tightly controlled how the public interacted with them.
Watch the video commentary at right, which explores the various aspects of Cagney’s persona on display in White Heat (1949, Walsh), a later gangster film in which he returns to the type of role that made him a star. In the commentary, I examine a number of Cagney’s acting techniques and draw connections to his overall movie stardom, especially focusing on the way White Heat’s Cody Jarrett interacts with his previous work in the gangster genre.
|
|
According to Jeanine Basinger’s book The Star Machine, some of the following qualities might be considered when finding and maintaining the images of stars: “A star has exceptional looks. Outstanding talent. A distinctive voice that can easily be recognized and imitated. A set of mannerisms. Palpable sexual appeal. Energy that comes down off the screen. Glamour. Androgyny. Glowing health and radiance. Panache. A single tiny flaw that mars their perfection, endearing them to ordinary people. Charm. The good luck to be in the right place at the right time (also known as just plain good luck). An emblematic quality that audiences believe is who they really are. The ability to make viewers ‘know’ what they are thinking whenever the camera comes up close. An established type (by which is meant that they could believably play the same role over and over again). A level of comfort in front of the camera. And, of course, ‘she has something,’ the bottom line of which is ‘it’s something you can’t define.’”
clip quiz - Classical storytelling in hollywood
Review the following clips and answer the questions on Blackboard.
BALL OF FIRE (1941, Hawks)
Based on this scene from Ball of Fire, how does the film establish the psychological motivations of the characters? What do these two people want, and how do you know that? |
|
CASABLANCA (1942, Curtiz)
How does the use of musical score in this clip from Casablanca help guide your emotions? What are you supposed to be feeling and how does the music help you do that? |
|
THE GREAT LIE (1941, Goulding)
What visual tools ensure your understanding of the action in this scene from The Great Lie? Describe four of the strategies the filmmakers use to do that in the camerawork and the editing. Be specific, with time stamps. |
|
THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937, McCarey)
The endings of movies made in the studio era tended to wrap up all the hanging narrative threads. How does this final scene of The Awful Truth, a comedy of remarriage, as the lead couple decides they don’t want to get divorced after all, create resolution? |
|
his girl Friday
Though the Pre-Code era of Classic Hollywood is most well-known for its salacious dramas and risqué subject matter, a number of important comedic films were also made before the institution of censorship restrictions. Chief among them was It Happened One Night (1934), directed by Frank Capra. The film is a landmark for a number of reasons, but one of them is because it is a high profile example of a genre of movies that came to be known as “screwball comedy.” Many of these comedies follow in It Happened One Night’s footsteps: a pair of stubborn protagonists, a man and a woman, are forced together by circumstance, initially dislike one another, and over the course of the film, inevitably fall in love. This is the template for the romantic comedy as we know it today; many contemporary examples of romantic comedies follow the template established by It Happened One Night and other films like it in the mid-1930s and early 1940s.
You can watch a commentary on a scene from It Happened One Night at right. In it, I articulate some of the characteristics of screwball comedies as represented by the performances given by stars Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, playing a spoiled heiress and cynical newspaper reporter. They have to work together to pretend to be a married couple to fool the police.
|
|
Screwball comedies were, in their day, an extremely commonplace and eventually influential genre. Thomas Schatz argues that “the genre derives its identity from a style of behavior (reflected in certain camerawork and editing techniques) and from narrative patterns that treat sexual confrontation and courtship through the socioeconomic conflicts of Depression America.” Genre shapes adaptation decisions considerably. Not only do films made after It Happened One Night take their own source material into account, but they also factor in other successful films made in the same style and imitate what made them work. Hollywood is extraordinarily dependent on capital; money matters because filmmaking is inordinately expensive, which means that in order to create a financially successful film, some degree of certainty over its connection with audiences is helpful in reducing risk. As a result, Hollywood studios tended to rely heavily on imitation and repetition. If a filmmaker stumbled onto a story that seemed to go over well with audiences, then studios were likely to do their best to turn that story into a formula and then repeat it in the hopes that they could keep the public coming back. This approach led to a number of other screwball comedies following on from It Happened One Night, including The Philadelphia Story (1940, Cukor) and His Girl Friday (1940, Hawks), among many others.
His Girl Friday is one of the most important of all the screwball comedies, largely because of the pure manic energy that director Howard Hawks infuses into the material, aided by the performances of actors Cary Grant (playing Walter Burns), Rosalind Russell (playing Hildy Johnson), and Ralph Bellamy (playing Bruce Baldwin). The performers invest each line reading with incredible specificity, delivering them with lightning quickness, articulating every syllable, even when they’re shouting over each other.
The movie is a breezy ninety minutes, and doesn’t stop running from the moment it begins. The will-they/won’t they romance between Walter and Hildy is a holdover from the play The Front Page, which the film is based on, but His Girl Friday makes a crucial change to that play’s dynamic: in The Front Page, Hildy is a man, and Walter just wants him to stay on the paper to get the story. Making Hildy into a woman for the film adds a layer of romantic tension, as Walter is also conspiring to reunite with her as his ex-wife. Screwball comedies and Hollywood cinema in the classical period thrived on sexual tension, especially when it couldn’t express itself openly thanks to the Code. His Girl Friday crackles with it in every scene between Walter and Hildy.
His Girl Friday demonstrates a number of the features of classic Hollywood. It is propelled by the performances of two stars in Grant and Russell; it progresses logically from scene to scene in a clearly ordered way, with characters pursuing easily identifiable goals; it is structured into an A-plot (the newspaper story) and a B-plot (the romance between Walter and Hildy), both of which are resolved neatly at the film’s end; it follows basic rules of continuity editing and subtle camera movement; and more, of course. Films like this exemplify what has often been referred to as “the genius of the system,” in which formulas and templates provided structure, within which filmmakers could do their work.
The classical mode of storytelling is highly influential. Though the Code is long gone, the star system and the basic approach developed during the studio era, in which films maximize clarity so that audiences can easily follow the story through a set of repeatable norms, lingers well into the contemporary moment. Filmmaking in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s had a dramatic impact on practice around the world—in one way or another, other filmmakers respond to the classical mode of storytelling, either by upholding it, revising and expanding it, or outright challenging it.