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Click for profiles on important and interesting media people:
Thomas Edison: The Kinetograph camera
Robert Flaherty: First documentary "Nanook"
Orson Welles: Clever applications of technique
THOMAS
EDISON
The 1890s was a ripe decade for quantum improvements in motion-picture technology. The premier inventor of his time, Thomas Edison, offered the Kinetograph camera in 1891.
Edison devised the Kinetograph after Eadwaerd Muybridge paid him a visit and brought along his famous still photos of animals in motion. The photos, when flipped rapidly, presented an optical illusion of the animals actually moving. The illusion, based on the persistence of vision phenomenon, involves the fraction-of-a-second delay it takes for an image to move from the human eye to the human brain. The brain, overloaded with data from the eyes, sees a blur rather than individual photos -- and the blur is motion. Edison was inspired by Muybridge's pictures, and his motion-picture camera followed.
Later Edison combined his invention of the Phonograph, back in 1877, to add sound to motion pictures.
Edison came by his inventiveness early. Even as a kid peddling newspapers to railroad travelers, he was seeing possibilities. At one point he started his own newspaper, a supplement, to sell on the trains. On the side he learned telegraphy and electricity from a railroad station-master. As an inventor, Edison went from one significant invention to another, including the electric light. bulb. All together, Edison held patents on more than 1,000 inventions.
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CRITICAL THINKING QUESTION
Can you explain how the persistence of vision phenomenon works in movies and television, and how a related aural phenomenon works with digital audio recording? |
BIBLIOGRAPHY
George Bryan. Edison: The Man and His Work. Garden City, 1926.
Roland Gelatt. The Fabulous Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High Fidelity. Lippincott, 1955. This is a comprehensive history through the Battle of the Speeds and the demise of the 78-rpm record.
Kathleen Mcauliffe. "The Undiscovered World of Thomas Edison." Atlantic (December 1995). Pages 1-8.
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© 1999, by John Vivian, Route 1, Box 32, Lewiston, Minnesota USA 55987-9706 |
ROBERT
FLAHERTY
Explorer Robert FIaherty took a camera to the Arctic in 1921 to record the life of an Eskimo family. The result was a new kind of movie: the documentary. While other movies of the time were theatrical productions with scripts, set and actors, Flaherty tried something different -- recording reality.
His 57-minute Nanook of the North was compelling on its own merits when it started on the movie house circuit in 1922, but the film received an unexpected macabre boost a few days later when Nanook, the father of the Eskimo family, died of hunger on the ice. News stories of Nanook's death stirred public interest and attendance at the movie, which helped establish the documentary as an important new film genre.
Flaherty's innovative approach took a new twist in the 1930s, when propagandists saw reality-based movies as a tool to promote their causes. In Germany the Nazi government produced propaganda films, and other countries followed. Frank Capra directed the vigorous five-film series Why We Fight for the U.S. War Office in 1942. During this time, Flaherty served as consultant to the National Film Board of Canada, and the board's films continued to bear his stamp for decades.
After World War II there was a revival of documentaries in Flaherty's style -- a neutral recording of natural history.
In the United States, the CBS television network gained a reputation in the 1950s and 1960s for picking up on the documentary tradition with Harvest of Shame on migrant workers, and Hunger in America. In the same period, the National Geographic Society established a documentary unit, and French explorer Jacques Cousteau went into the television documentary business.
Today documentaries are unusual in American movie houses, with occasional exceptions like Mother Teresa in 1986 and movies built around rock concerts.
Full-length documentaries mostly are relegated to the Public Broadcasting Service and cable networks today. The major networks, meanwhile, shifted most documentaries away from full-length treatments. Typical was CBS's 60 Minutes, a weekly one-hour program of three mini-documentaries. These new network projects, which included ABC's 20/20 combined reality programming and entertainment in slick packages that attracted larger audiences than traditional documentaries. |
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CRITICAL THINKING QUESTION
How would you address Alan Freed's critics, who claimed rock 'n' roll music corrupted a generation of young people? |
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Thomas W. Bohn and Richard I. Stromgren. Light and Shadows: A History of Motion Pictures. Alfred, 1975. This is a lively, comprehensive examination. |
© 1999, by John Vivian, Route 1, Box 32, Lewiston, Minnesota USA 55987-9706 |
ORSON
WELLES
Orson Welles has been acclaimed as one of the century's most brilliant movie-makers. Commentator Peter Cowie said: "Welles did not invent new cinematic processes: he fused the experience of three decades into one gigantic work that proclaimed with tremendous power just how effective a medium the cinema could be." Welles' 1941 Citizen Kane was his best known. Geometric groupings suggested psychological moods. So did mirrors, and light and mist. In one scene, masses of people underneath the main character enforced the idea of subversiveness. Camera angles and techniques made Citizen Kane work at many levels.
The attention that Citizen Kane received was less due less to its artistic merits than the furor stirred by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who saw the movie as a thinly veiled, unflattering biography. The similarities were striking. Welles' central character, Charles Foster Kane, was a newspaper tycoon whose empire crumbled, as did a political career. In the end, an embittered Kane dies a lonely character whose precious "Rosebud," a childhood sled, is the only thing he ever appreciated in a truly human way. Kane had Hearst's speech mannerisms, and his girlfriend, like Hearst's, loved jigsaw puzzles. Welles denied that Kane was Hearst, but nobody believed it.
In a pre-release screening, Hearst movie columnist Louella Parsons saw the resemblance right away. Hearst responded immediately. He threatened the RKO studio with a blackout in all his newspapers -- not one mention -- if the movie were released. Hearst said he would withdraw investments from RKO projects. Hearst was considered one of the most powerful people in the nation, and RKO, fearing a smear that might hurt all Hollywood, waffled and delayed the release. Months later, Citizen Kane opened. To many movie-goers it was a disappointment. Many of Welles' cinematic techniques were too sophisticated for the mass cinematic literacy of the time. Nonetheless, the critical acclaim made it a classic that remains available today.
Ironically, when Welles died in 1985, William Randolph Hearst Jr., who had criticized the Citizen Kane portrayal of his father, expressed regret: "It makes me made because I wanted to meet that man. I really wanted to talk about that movie." |
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CRITICAL THINKING QUESTION
Did Orson Welles take too much literary license for Citizen Kane to be considered biographical? |
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Peter Cowie. The Cinema of Orson Welles. Da Capo. 1989.
Robert L. Carringer. The Making of Citizen Kane. University of California Press, 1985.
"Hearst v. Orson Welles." Newseeek (January 20, 1941).
Pauline Kael. The Citizen Kane Book: Raising Kane. Limelight, 1984.
Sarah Street. "Citizen Kane." History Today (March 1996), Pages 458-52. |
© 1999, by John Vivian, Route 1, Box 32, Lewiston, Minnesota USA 55987-9706 |
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