It’s more or less agreed upon that the period between the advent of sound (early 30s) until the advent of television (1950s in America, later in other countries) was a “Golden Age” for cinema. That isn’t to say that every film produced in that period was of outstanding quality or that any product of another time period is not of high quality. But it was during this time that filmmakers around the world really hit their stride. Not surprisingly, the character of the Golden Age was felt differently in different parts of the world. Nevertheless, in all the world’s Golden Ages, there was a shared coming together of commercialism and art. The films that gave the age its name were golden in both senses of the word–they were of high quality and also made a lot of money.
Perhaps our chief pitfalls to avoid in this tidbit are the tendency to say that “everything was better in the good old days” and the knee-jerk opposite tendency to say that “everything is the same always and at all times–now that we’ve settled that I’d like to continue to post malicious comments on YouTube and 4chan.” Indeed, the second pitfall seems to be more prevalent here in our home town of the blogosphere. But I think that if we consider a number of simple factors we should be able to get a fairly clear picture of what characterized the Golden Age.
Truffaut, though often cast as a defender of commercial (or at least popular) movies, described the difference between the Golden Age and what came after it in the introductory essay to his classic compendium “The Films In My Life” (p.6, part of What Do Critics Dream About? 1975):
André Bazin could not write today that “All films are born free and equal.” Film production, like book publishing, has become diversified and specialized. During the war, Clouzot, Carné, Delannoy, Christian-Jaque, Henri Decoin, Cocteau and Bresson addressed the same public. This is no longer true. Today few films are conceived for the “general” public—people who wander into a movie theater by chance, attracted simply by the stills at the entrance.
Today, in America, people make films that are directed to minorities—blacks, Irish; there are karate films, surfing films, movies for children and for teenagers. There is one great difference between the productions of today and those of former days: Jack Warner, Darryl F. Zanuck, Lous B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle and Harry Cohn loved the films they produced and took pride in them; today the owners of major companies are often disgusted by the sex-and-violence films they throw into the market so they won’t be left behind by the competition.
Truffaut eschews any questions of why or how the Golden Age started or ended. But he points to an interesting symptom: the people who are responsible for bringing the films into existence are not happy with the films that they make. Rather than attempting to appeal to different temperaments (as has always been common with genre pictures, especially in Japan), the later film producers played an “identity marketing” game with the most vulgar of attractors.
I mentioned the Japanese print once before to help understand film paradigms and I’ll probably do so again in the future. The combination of shameless commercialism (many of the prints were literally just advertisements for kimono shops, tea houses or the likes) with breathtaking beauty, all imbued with the subtlest of gestures towards the infinite make them a natural companion to the cinema.
Here the most dominant factor that we will consider is technology. More advanced printing technologies led to the boom that was the late 18th through mid-19th century ukiyo-e. Even a cursory chronological scan of printmaking in Edo period Japan reveals a complexification of materials and process which culminated in the mid 19th century—just in time to be made obsolete by the advent of photography, lithography and a viciously modernizing political agenda.
It is perhaps inescapable that a medium created by technological progress will ultimately be destroyed by it. Unlike static media (e.g. literature, painting, sculpture), a technologically induced medium is always changing as its technology changes. And in the process whole artforms are created and destroyed. Silent film is an obvious example. Anyone who’s watched silent films extensively can identify a certain magic that was erased, or at the very least drowned out, by the advent of sound. Silent film is not just a talkie on mute. It had its own laws, conventions, strengths and weaknesses. Ozu was famously resisted switching to sound because he felt he was on the brink of mastering the art of silent film. It wasn’t the novelty of sound that destroyed silent film. Unlike technologically static media, silent film had identified itself with a new technology and when that technology advanced it disappeared.
To a great extent, I think that the relationship between ukiyo-e and photography was similar to the relationship between film and television. In neither case did one really prove a substitute for the other but the newer and cheaper technology sufficiently crippled the older industry so that it never really came back. The response to the Japanese prints continued in a radically more “artistic” vein, in the “creative print” movements of the 20th century. And the film world split: artistic films became more and more austere and even anti-commercial at times while “mainstream” films were commercialized in a soul-extinguishing way that needs no description for readers today. (Once again, I’m not talking about all films but rather “your average film:” the box office leaders and what have you.)
In Japan, the effects of television were striking. The watershed event that changed the cultural landscape of Japan was the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Of course, for many of us the cinema died on December 12, 1963 but we’ll save that discussion for later.) In 1958, only 10% of the population had television sets but by 1964, over 80% of the population watched the inaugural ceremony of the Olympics, many on television. According to Anderson, by the mid-60s 60% of Japanese homes had televisions and by 1970 over 95%. Though the economy was strong, the film industry suffered tremendously and attendance fell directly with the adoption of television: in 1958 annual movie attendance was 1,127 million but by 1975 it was only 170 million–a fall of 85%. (See this interesting article for more on the history of TV in Japan.)
Daiei, which produced Rashomon (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1950) and other classics, went bankrupt along with many other small companies. Shochiku, Nikkatsu and Toho survived thanks to their diversified interests. Thus the rise of Shochiku bowling alleys and Nikkatsu office buildings. The justifiable panic which engulfed the studios was translated into a harshly commercialist attitude which alienated all of the great directors and arguably drove away even more viewers. Until the advent of TV, the “studio system” reigned. That means that the directors were retained by a studio and given more or less creative freedom. As part of the TV panic, they switched to the “producer system” in which the decision of what gets made and how devolves to someone who is selected for their business sense alone. After 1964, Kurosawa almost stopped making films. Gosho and Naruse were crushed by the new rules. Ichikawa had to switch off between masterpieces and plebeian crowdpleasers in order to eat. Now, in 2009, with Okuribito taking the Best Foreign Film Oscar, there’s talk of a national cinema revival. I hope it’s true.
The golden age was born when film technology plateaued in the 1930s and kept enough of a lock on the crowd that the studios could comfortably support directors and producers who made what they wanted to, what they believed in. As that comfort slipped away, the film industry has settled into a much more ruthlessly commercial enterprise. Television is in many ways a further development of the film medium–cheaper, more convenient–and its rise put the film industry through a trauma from which it has never recovered.
In closing, I’d pose the same question about television. Namely, we see today a growing irrelevance of TV as a medium because everything can be obtained less painfully on the internet. What will this mean for the future of TV? Will anyone care about HDTV when you can stream HD quality video on your fiber optically linked computer? What will the media companies do in response. Here’s one prediction. Have any others?
July 14, 2009 at 12:37 am
“Unlike static media (e.g. literature, painting, sculpture), a technologically induced medium is always changing as its technology changes.”
Aren’t all media technologically induced, though? Even the “static” media you mention– was not literature revolutionized by the printing press in the 1400s, painting by the invention of portable paints and advances in the study of optics in the late 1800s, sculpture in the 1900s with the new welding torches, etc. etc.? (Although I would not characterize sculpture as static but that is for another discussion)
As for the future of TV, take a look at Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy. A grueling pithy read but I could safely say it changed my life. You can borrow it if you want.
July 14, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Thank you for your challenging comment. Since technology is everywhere and necessarily imbues all art and it always changes, one might indeed be tempted to equate all artforms as “technologically induced.” However the technological aspect of the tablets of Ugarit (15 century BCE), the Gutenberg bible (15th century CE) and this comment are effectively identical. The place of the written word in society has obviously changed since then but no technology has threatened to make writing obsolete. Compare that with silent film. Before the late 19th century there were no motion pictures. The fate of the early incarnation of cinema was inextricably linked to its technological platform. It became identified with its platform and ultimately became seen as a stepping stone to another artform rather than an artform in its own right. I do not even see the possibility of that with any of the static media. The relationship between talkies and TV is not as cut and dry. Films have continued but their golden age is over.
Obviously I don’t understand this process in its entirety (or even in a large part). What exactly is the mechanism of creation and destruction? Could there have been a world in which silent films and talkies live side by side in peace (other than my hard drive
)? I totally glossed over the Meiji restoration in my discussion of ukiyo-e. But still, I think that there is something of truth there in the fragile dynamism of technologically induced media.
McLuhan’s book looks interesting. Maybe I’ll check it out when I’m stateside for the summer. Thanks again for keeping this from being a monologue.
July 21, 2009 at 3:50 am
This doesn’t address everything you mentioned but something interesting to think about:
You say that writing has maintained pretty much the same form since its inception. Sure, when you look at the text appearing here and thousands of years ago there’s not much that’s changed other than the various media that contains it and some stylizing. But what you forget is that you are looking at the text with a heavy visual bias. Though we are slowly departing from the visual society that we have been steeped in since the alphabet and especially since the printing press, most of us are still locked in a very eye-heavy way of thinking. Writing looks the same throughout all the historical changes, but it does not sound the same. What I mean is that until relatively modern times, reading always meant reading aloud. Reading was more of a auditory experience than a visual one. Publishing a book for the Greeks and Romans meant getting a bunch of people together and reciting their ideas. Medieval learning and memorization was always done aloud, as monks in monasteries sat in separate booths so that they could read without disturbing others. The study of punctuation and grammar only served to make sure the words were pronounced correctly when read aloud. Silent reading was practically unheard of. Then when the printing press turned words into a portable commodity, writing became silent. Reading silently to oneself slowly became the norm and reading aloud was looked down upon as the mark of low intelligence. Writing is now effectively silent.
So yes, though it looks the same writing has changed drastically in terms of its sound. This is like what you describe with film but backwards and decelerated. While film went from silence to sound, writing went from sound to silence. And both due to technological innovation paired with people’s perception of progress.
(Oh, and correction: the book that talks about TV is actually Understanding Media of the same author. Galaxy focuses on writing. I’d recommend reading Understanding Media first so galaxy is more digestible)
July 23, 2009 at 3:11 pm
That’s an interesting perspective and I hadn’t thought of reading like that. I still don’t think that the comparison to silent film really holds. What kind of writing was abolished with the invention of the printing press? People’s experience of reading changed but what they were reading did not. Compare the few ancient novels (Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Murasaki’s Genji Monogatari) with their modern counterparts and the similarities are truly shocking. I actually mean that seriously, I was really shocked to read Genji (at least the first dozen or so chapters in the Wales translation) and to see how “modern” it was. Then watch some Murnau, Wiene, Lang, Keaton, Eisenstein or Dovzhenko films and compare them with their counterparts in the world of sound–only a few years later! The shock of the modern-ness of Genji becomes the shock of the difference between film in the 20s and 40s.