ASSESSMENT BLOG #2




“Ïf you want to send a message call Western Union”, so said Sam Goldwyn (or maybe Jack Warner or somebody completely different. Hollywood movies post World War 1 catered for popular public taste and stuck to the staples of comedy, romance and westerns to fill cinemas. Contrast to earlier American movies such as A Corner in Wheat which could have come directly from the Marxist instruction book. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation had a strong message, unpalatable today, for the audience. Perhaps the commercial failure of Griffith’s next epic Intolerance scared the industry. In the end maybe it was the consolidation of the movie industry with the biggest studios being controlled by movie theatre owners (eg MGM) that dictated what films were made in Hollywood. As the saying goes, nobody ever lost money by underestimating public taste. In the end the movie industry, from production through distribution to showing is just another highly capital intensive business that needs predictable returns which means lots of bums on seats not just the cultured ones. Contrast this with the great Russian movies of Eisenstein which notwithstanding their quality were really government directed and subsidized propaganda. However Russian audiences may have preferred Charlie Chaplin to the triumph of the workers if they had been allowed a choice.



By the way did anyone notice the Day for Night scenes in the Battleship Potemkin. That is scenes shot in daylight but processed to portray night by use of filters and underexposure. Infra red film may also have been used to give this effect. It was used frequently (and still is) in Hollywood but I don’t recall seeing it in such an early movie. In France it is called La Nuit Americain (American Night) and Truffaut made a film of that name in 1973 about the movie industry.