ArtsWatch
By Robert Gelfand
October 10, 2008 -- Pordenone, Italy -- Here at the annual convention of silent film scholars, fans, and audience members, distance provides perspective, and one small bit of that perspective involves our national inferiority complex over culture.
Let's face it, when it comes to renaissance art, we can't compete because, for one, we weren't around during the renaissance. Most of the popular operas were written by Europeans, and cubism wasn't quite our forte'. But at least as far as one cultural realm is concerned, we can compete with the best of them.
That realm is cinema. Film. The movies. In this gathering of international historians, archivists, and just plain lovers of filmed drama, the American presence is a must because, for one thing, we invented the darned thing (yes, it came from the Thomas Edison organization). Then we developed it (sometimes in parallel with others of like genius), and then we took it to the current level of international preeminence. At this 27th version of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (rough translation: the festival of silent film), we exist as equals on a world stage that has created the great art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The American domination in the world film market is not and has never been complete, but it has been going on to one extent or another for three-quarters of a century. That doesn't mean that there aren't great filmmakers in other parts of the world, but that they exist within a milieu in which everything from the size of the film (what we call 35 millimeter) to the spacing of the sprocket holes to the number of frames per second is an American invention. And the language of cinema, by which we mean the way that you, the audience, understand what is going on when confronted with a variety of cuts, splices, dissolves, and flashbacks, all stitched together to create a coherent storyline, was, if not uniquely American, a co-creation of Americans, western Europeans, and Russians. Here in Pordenone (pronounced, approximately, Pour Den Own Eh), scholars discuss how they are still working to sort out the evolution of an art form which began with shots only a few seconds long, as simple as a man sneezing or a train coming towards you, and developed into Casablanca and The Godfather.
There is also a whole project here, dedicated to studying the films of D.W. Griffith, because his work was seminal in developing and popularizing the way that movies are constructed. Griffith brought his company west from New York City during the winter months of 1911 and 1912, and shortly thereafter made the move permanent.
In Los Angeles, Griffith made one of the most important films in the history of the medium, The Birth of a Nation. The film itself is evil and racist, but functioned at the time as the breakthrough for the modern feature length film -- in a word, the first blockbuster. Griffith then made Intolerance, a nicer film on the whole, which was viewed all over the world and is said to have influenced Eisenstein in terms of the way he photographed Battleship Potemkin.
There is a huge Los Angeles contribution to the history of film. Some of this is obvious to the most historically naive, because the Hollywood studios became a central part of popular culture by the beginning of the 1920s. But there is an older, deeper part of the story, which involves the creation and dissolution of dozens of studios at all levels, beginning before 1910 and continuing into the present day. At various times, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Mack Sennett (of the Keystone Kops) and lots of others built studios, made movies, and sometimes made money. It is at this level that Los Angeles has a special place in the history of art. To put it bluntly, the comedians who made movies in Los Angeles in the 1920s have never been equaled, and audiences continue to crack up (certainly this week in Pordenone) when their work is shown.
There is one other special name that is associated with film culture and with Los Angeles -- Mary Pickford. Commuters who drive past Olympic Blvd and Beverly Drive have seen a statue devoted to Mary, even if they don't quite know who she was. Pickford was an early performer for D.W. Griffith in the infancy of the movies, developed a major career of her own over the next decades, and was the brains behind the founding of United Artists. An opening night audience laughed and cried over her film Sparrows, timed to introduce a major new documentary narrated by Sir Michael York. Pickford exemplifies that other mainline element of cinema, the tearjerker. It's hard to imagine what cinema would look like even now had Mary not existed.
It's curious that with this significant, legitimate contribution to world culture, Los Angeles has been fairly lax in presenting our history to the tourist trade. For renaissance art, there are art galleries that are open to the public. For the modern masters, there is the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art. Los Angeles, unfortunately, hasn't done much to trade on its name and history when it comes to serious students of the form. Perhaps this is because the industry thinks of itself as just that -- an industry -- and not as an enduring art form.
There are lots of things we could do to improve on the situation. Not the least of these would be to provide for screenings of historically important films for the foreign tourists who visit Hollywood (expecting something more and better than they actually experience). Then we could try to invent a legitimate, honest tour of the region that honors our cinematic history. This is the sort of thing the Department of Cultural Affairs might choose to tackle.
(Robert Gelfand is writer and an occasional arts critic for CityWatch.) ◘
CityWatch
Vol 6 Issue 82
Pub: 10-10-08
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