produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Vincente MINNELLI, Gene KELLY, and
Stanley Donen.
The Film in Europe and Australia From 1950
The stimulus for defining a new film content and style came to the United
States from abroad, where many previously dormant film industries sprang to
life in the postwar years to produce an impressive array of films for the
international market. The European film renaissance can be said to have
started in Italy with such masters of NEOREALISM as Roberto Rossellini, in
Open City (1945), Vittorio DE SICA, in The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Umberto
D (1952), and Luchino VISCONTI, in La Terra Trema (1948). Federico FELLINI
broke with the tradition to make films of a more poetic and personal nature
such as I Vitelloni (1953) and La Strada (1954) and then shifted to a more
sensational style in the 1960s with La Dolce Vita (1960) and the
intellectual 8 1/2 (1963). Visconti in the 1960s and ’70s would also adopt
a more flamboyant approach and subject matter in lush treatments of
corruption and decadence such as The Damned (1970). A new departure–both
artistic and thematic–was evidenced by Michelangelo ANTONIONI in his
subtle psychosocial trilogy of films that began with L’Aventura (1960).
The vitality of a second generation of Italian filmmakers was impressively
demonstrated by Lina WERTMULLER in The Seduction of Mimi (1974) and Seven
Beauties (1976) and by Bernardo BERTOLUCCI, who in films like Before the
Revolution (1964), The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), and
1900 (1977) fused radical social and political ideology with a stunning
aestheticism.^With the coming of NEW WAVE films in the late 1950s, the
French cinema reasserted the artistic primacy it had enjoyed in the prewar
period. Applying a personal style to radically different forms of film
narrative, New Wave directors included Claude CHABROL (The Cousins, 1959),
Francois TRUFFAUT (The 400 Blows, 1959; Jules and Jim, 1961), Alain RESNAIS
(Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959), and Jean-Luc GODARD, who, following the
success of his offbeat Breathless (1960), became progressively more
committed to a Marxist interpretation of society, as seen in Two or Three
Things I Know About Her (1966), Weekend (1967), and La Chinoise (1967).
Eric ROHMER, mining a more traditional vein, produced sophisticated “moral
tales” in My Night at Maud’s (1968) and Claire’s Knee (1970); while Louis
MALLE audaciously explored such charged subjects as incest and
collaborationism in Murmur of the Heart (1971) and Lacombe Lucien (1974).
The Spaniard Luis Bunuel, working in Mexico, Spain, and France–and defying
all categorization–continued to break new ground with ironic examinations
of the role of religion (Nazarin, 1958; Viridiana, 1961; The Milky Way,
1969) and absurdist satires on middle-class foibles (The Discreet Charm of
the Bourgeoisie, 1972).^From Sweden Ingmar BERGMAN emerged in the 1950s as
the master of introspective, often death-obsessed studies of complex human
relationships. Although capable of comedy, as in Smiles of a Summer Night
(1955), Bergman was at his most impressive in more despairing,
existentialist dramas such as The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries
(1957), Persona (1966), and Cries and Whispers (1972), in all of these
aided by a first-rate acting ensemble and brilliant cinematography.^British
film, largely reduced to a spate of Alec GUINNESS comedies by the early
1950s, was revitalized over the next decade by the ability of directors
working in England to produce compelling cinematic translations of the
“angry young man” novelists and playwrights, of Harold PINTER’s
existentialist dramas, and of the traditional great British novels.
Britain regained a healthy share of the market with films such as Jack
Clayton’s Room at the Top (1958); Tony Richardson’s Look Back in Anger
(1959), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), and Tom Jones
(1963); Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Morgan
(1966); Lindsay ANDERSON’s This Sporting Life (1963); Joseph LOSEY’s The
Servant (1963) and Accident (1967); Ken RUSSELL’s Women in Love (1969); and
John Schlesinger’S Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971). The popularity of the
James Bond spy series, which began in 1962, gave the industry an added
boost.^The internationalism both of the film market and of film
distribution after 1960 was underscored by the emergence even in smaller
countries of successful film industries and widely recognized directorial
talent: Andrzej WAJDA and Roman POLANSKI in Poland; Jan KADAR, Milos
FORMAN, Ivan PASSER, and Jiri Menzel in Czechoslovakia; and, more recently,
Wim WENDERS, Werner HERZOG, and Rainer Werner FASSBINDER in West Germany.
The death (1982) of Fassbinder ended an extraordinary and prolific career,
but his absence has yet to be felt–particularly in the United States,
where many of his earlier films are being shown for the first
time.^Australia is a relatively new entrant into the contemporary world
film market. Buoyed by government subsidies, Australian directors have
produced a group of major films within the past decade: Peter WEIR’s
Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave (1977), Gillian Armstrong’s My
Brilliant Career (1979) and Star Struck (1982), Fred Schepisi’s The Devil’s
Playground and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978), and Bruce Beresford’s
Breaker Morant (1980). Beresford, Weir, and Schepisi have since directed
films with U.S. backing; Beresford’s Tender Mercies (1983) is about that
most American phenomenon, the country-western singer.
Postwar Film in Asia
Thriving film industries have existed in both Japan and India since the
silent era. It was only after World War II, however, that non-Western
cinematic traditions became visible and influential internationally. The
Japanese director Akira KUROSAWA opened a door to the West with his widely
acclaimed Rashomon (1950), an investigation into the elusive nature of
truth. His samurai dramas, such as The Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of
Blood (1957), an adaptation of Macbeth, Yojimbo (1961), and Kagemusha
(1980), were ironic adventure tales that far transcended the usual Japanese
sword movies, a genre akin to U.S. westerns. Kenzi MIZOGUCHI is known for
his stately period films Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1955).
Yoshiro Ozu’s poetic studies of modern domestic relations (Tokyo Story,
1953; An Autumn Afternoon, (1962) introduced Western audiences to a
personal sensitivity that was both intensely national and universal.
Younger directors, whose careers date from the postwar burgeoning of the
Japanese film, include Teinosuke Kinugasa (Gate of Hell, 1953), Hiroshi
Teshigahara (Woman of the Dunes, 1964, from a script by the novelist ABE
KOBO), Masahiro Shinoda (Under the Cherry Blossoms, 1975), Nagisa Oshima
(The Ceremony, 1971) and Musaki Kobayashi, best known for his nine-hour
trilogy on the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, The Human Condition
(1959-61), and Harakiri (1962), a deglamorization of the samurai
tradition.^The film industry in India, which ranks among the largest in the
world, has produced very little for international consumption. Its most
famous director, Satyajit RAY, vividly brings to life the problems of an
India in transition, in particular in the trilogy comprising Pather
Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and The World of Apu (1958). Bengali is
the language used in almost all Ray’s films. In 1977, however, he produced
The Chess Players, with sound tracks in both Hindi and English.
American Film Today
Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the American film industry accommodated
itself to the competition of this world market; to a film audience that had
shrunk from 80 million to 20 million weekly; to the tastes of a primarily
young and educated audience; and to the new social and sexual values
sweeping the United States and much of the rest of the industrialized
world. The Hollywood studios that have survived in name (Paramount,
Warners, Universal, MGM, Fox) are today primarily offices for film
distribution. Many are subsidiaries of such huge conglomerates as the Coca
Cola Company or Gulf and Western. Increasingly, major films are being shot
in places other than Hollywood (New York City, for example, is recovering
its early status as a filmmaking center), and Hollywood now produces far
more television movies, series, and commercials than it does motion
pictures.^American movies of the past 20 years have moved more strongly
into social criticism (Doctor Strangelove, 1963; The Graduate, 1967; The
Godfather, 1971; One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975; The Deer Hunter,
1978; Norma Rae, 1979; Apocalypse Now, 1979; Missing, 1982); or they have
offered an escape from social reality into the realm of fantasy, aided by
the often beautiful, sometimes awesome effects produced by new film
technologies (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968; Jaws, 1975; Star Wars and Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977; Altered States, 1979; E. T., 1982); or
they have returned to earnest or comic investigations of the dilemmas of
everyday life (a troubled family, in Ordinary People, 1980; divorce life
and male parenting, in Kramer v. Kramer, 1979; women in a male world, in
Nine to Five, 1979, and Tootsie, 1982). The most successful directors of
the past 15 years–Stanley KUBRICK, Robert ALTMAN, Francis Ford COPPOLA,
Woody ALLEN, George LUCAS, and Steven SPIELBERG–are those who have played
most imaginatively with the tools of film communication itself. The stars
of recent years (with the exceptions of Paul NEWMAN and Robert REDFORD)
have, for their part, been more offbeat and less glamorous than their
predecessors of the studio era–Robert DE NIRO, Jane Fonda (see FONDA
FAMILY), Dustin HOFFMAN, Jack NICHOLSON, Al PACINO, and Meryl STREEP.^The
last two decades have seen the virtual extinction of animated film, which
is too expensive to make well, and the rebirth of U.S. documentary film in
the insightful work of Fred WISEMAN, the Maysles brothers, Richard Leacock
and Donn Pennebaker, and, in Europe, of Marcel OPHULS. Even richer is the
experimental, or underground, movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in which
filmmakers such as Stan BRAKHAGE, Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie, Hollis
Frampton, Michael Snow, and Robert Breer have worked as personally and
abstractly with issues of visual and psychological perception as have
modern painters and poets. The new vitality of these two opposite
traditions–the one devoted to revealing external reality, the other to
revealing the life of the mind–underscores the persistence of the
dichotomy inherent in the film medium. In the future, film will probably
continue to explore these opposing potentialities. Narrative films in
particular will probably continue trends that began with the French New
Wave, experimenting with more elliptical ways of telling film stories and
either borrowing or rediscovering many of the images, themes, and devices
of the experimental film itself. GERALD MAST
Bibliography
Bibliography:GENERAL HISTORIES AND CRITICISM: Arnheim, Rudolf, Film as Art
(1957; repr. 1971); Bazin, Andre, What is Cinema?, 2 vols., trans. by
Hugh Gray (1967, 1971); Cook, David A., A History of Narrative Film,
1889-1979 (1981); Cowie, Peter, ed., Concise History of the Cinema, 2 vols.
(1970); Eisenstein, Sergei M., Film Form (1949; repr. 1969); Halliwell,
Leslie, Filmgoer’s Companion, 6th ed. (1977); Jowett, Garth, Film: The
Democratic Art (1976); Kael, Pauline, Reeling (1976), and 5,000 Nights at
the Movies: A Guide from A to Z (1982); Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of
Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960); Mast, Gerald, A Short
History of the Movies, 2d ed. (1976); Mast, Gerald, and Cohen, Marshall,
Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (1974); Monaco, James, How
to Read a Film (1977); Peary, Danny, Cult Movies (1981); Robinson, David,
The History of World Cinema (1973).^ NATIONAL FILM HISTORIES: AMERICAN:
Higham, Charles, The Art of American Film, 1900-1971 (1973); Monaco, James,
American Film Now: The People, the Power, the Movies (1979); Sarris,
Andrew, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 (1968);
Sklar, Robert, Movie-Made America (1975).^AUSTRALIAN: Stratton, David, The
Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival (1981).^BRITISH: Armes, Roy, A
History of British Cinema (1978); Low, Rachael, The History of British
Film, 4 vols. (1973); Manvell, Roger, New Cinema in Britain
(1969).^FRENCH: Armes, Roy, The French Cinema Since 1946, 2 vols., rev.
ed. (1970); Harvey, Sylvia, May ‘68 and Film Culture (rev. ed., 1980);
Monaco, James, The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette
(1976); Sadoul, Georges, French Film (1953; repr. 1972).^GERMAN: Barlow,
John D., German Expressionist Film (1982); Hull, David S., Film of the
Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema, 1933-1945 (1969); Manvell,
Roger, and Fraenkel, Heinrich, The German Cinema (1971); Sandford, John The
New German Cinema (1980); Wollenberg, H. H., Fifty Years of German Film
(1948; repr. 1972).^ITALIAN: Jarratt, Vernon, Italian Cinema (1951; repr.
1972); Leprohon, Pierre, The Italian Cinema (1972); Rondi, Gian, Italian
Cinema Today (1965); Witcombe, Roger, The New Italian Cinema
(1982).^JAPANESE: Mellen, Joan, The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan Through
Its Cinema (1976); Richie, Donald, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965), and
The Japanese Movie: An Illustrated History (1966); Sato, Tadao, Currents
in Japanese Cinema (1982).^RUSSIAN: Cohen, Louis H., The
Cultural-Political Traditions and Development of the Soviet Cinema,
1917-1972 (1974); Dickenson, Thorold, and De La Roche, Catherine, Soviet
Cinema (1948; repr. 1972); Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and
Soviet Film (1960; repr. 1973); Taylor, Richard, Film Propaganda: Soviet
Russia and Nazi Germany (1979).^SWEDISH: Cowie, Peter, Swedish Cinema
(1966); Donner, Jorn, The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman (1964); Hardy,
Forsyth, The Scandinavian Film (1952; repr. 1972).
Porter, Cole
——————————–
Cole Porter, b. Peru, Ind., June 9, 1892, d. Oct. 15, 1964, was an
American lyricist and composer of popular songs for stage and screen. A
graduate of Yale College, he attended Harvard School of Arts and Sciences
for 2 years and later studied under the French composer Vincent d’Indy.
Both his lyrics and music have a witty sophistication, technical
virtuosity, and exquisite sense of style that have rarely been paralleled
in popular music. He contributed brilliant scores to numerous Broadway
musicals, such as Anything Goes (1934) and Kiss Me, Kate (1948), and to
motion pictures. His best songs have become classics; these include “Begin
the Beguine,” “Night and Day,” and “I Love Paris.” DAVID EWEN
Bibliography: Eells, George, The Life that Late He Led: A Biography of Cole
Porter (1967); Kimball, Robert, ed., Cole (1971); Schwartz, Charles, Cole
Porter (1977).
Griffith, D. W.
——————————–
David Lewelyn Wark Griffith, b. La Grange, Ky., Jan. 23, 1875, d. July
23, 1948, is recognized as the greatest single film director and most
consistently innovative artist of the early American film industry. His
influence on the development of cinema was worldwide.
After gaining experience with a Louisville stock company, he was employed
as an actor and writer by the Biograph Film Company of New York in 1907.
The following year he was offered a director-producer contract and, for the
next five years, oversaw the production of more than 400 one- and two-reel
films. As his ideas grew bolder, however, he felt increasingly frustrated
by the limitations imposed by his employers. Griffith left Biograph in
1913 to join Reliance-Majestic as head of production, and in 1914, he began
his most famous film, based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon.
This Civil War Reconstruction epic, known as The Birth of a Nation (1915),
became a landmark in American filmmaking, both for its artistic merits and
for its unprecedented use of such innovative techniques as flashbacks,
fade-outs, and close-ups. The film was harshly condemned, however, for its
racial bias and glorification of the Ku Klux Klan; several subsequent
lynchings were blamed on the film. In response to this criticism, Griffith
made what many consider his finest film, Intolerance (1916), in which the