List of Headings
- i Soaring costs affect the ways films are made
- ii Opposition mounts against some big operators
- iii An influential figure in American Cinema
- iv The increasing realism of film content
- v A close look at some revolutionary techniques
- vi New organisations emerge
- vii The technical problems associated with film-making
- viii The changing role of the venues where films were shown
- ix Changing views on film-making
- x The international popularity of American Cinema
Passage
Drag a heading to each paragraph.
1. Standards in American film-making rose immeasurably in the years between 1910 and 1918 and this was practically speaking the single-handed achievement of David Wark Griffith. His achievement can hardly be paralleled in the history of art.
2. Before Griffith, the accepted convention was to show the actors in full length. Griffith, with his love for Victorian painting, employed composition. He saw the image as having a foreground and a rear ground as well as the middle distance, and perspective as well as two-dimensional movement. By 1910 he was quite regularly using close-ups to reveal significant details of the scene or of an actor's playing, and extreme long shots to achieve a sense of spectacle and distance.
3. As American standards in film-making rose, America took the artistic and also the economic lead. Film-making became a comparatively respectable occupation, doubtfully acknowledged in some quarters as art.
4. Vast new studios, such as Fox and Universal City, sprang up in and around a new Hollywood which was mushrooming out of the quiet town of wide roads and one-storey houses that the first-makers had found.
5. As salaries and production expenses mounted, producers sought ways of standardising production methods, of discovering sure-fire values that could be injected into their films to guarantee success at the box office.
6. The system was clearly open to many abuses by the distributor, who could exploit it to unload any junk on the unfortunate exhibitor, and resentment led to the formation in 1917 of the First National Exhibitors' Circuit.
7. Cinemas were no longer converted stores, but custom-built edifices, elegant 'palaces' in high-class districts.