Search Results

Numerous factors accounted for the precipitous decline in musicals starting in mid-1930. The stock market crash and the Pathé studio fire in 1929 were dire omens, and the overabundance of backstage films and unsuitability of filmed revues and operettas played a prominent role. Songs were cut from a number of (former) musicals such as The Life of the Party, while some major projects were aborted shortly before shooting. Most calamitous was MGM's The March of Time, a lavish and shapeless revue that was tinkered with incessantly and finally abandoned, a symbol of the hubris and miscalculation of the era.

Capellani arrived in Pathé, at the time the premiere film producing company in the world, around 1905. Very quickly he became an important member of the company, showing a visual and dramatic sense ahead of its time. By 1907, Charles Pathé introduced the rental of prints, creating the modern system of exhibition. Capellani was ambitious, and Pathé promoted him to supervisor of its new subsidiary company, the SCAGL.

This chapter analyzes the expansion of film studios into mass production centers in major Western cities, focusing on Gaumont and Pathé’s studios in Paris. As these studios began to look and operate more like the industrial centers of the later Hollywood “dream factory system,” their architectural spaces shaped concurrent (or “convergent”) practices of cinematic, artistic, and industrial production, all while adapting to the changing infrastructure of modernizing Paris.

In 1915, Capellani was faced with a difficult decision: staying in France at Pathé and waiting for the studio to resume activity, or crossing the Atlantic to work in the United States. He decided to leave Pathé for good when he learned that the famous theater director André Antoine had been recruited to make films. There was no friendship between Antoine and Capellani, contrary to earlier opinion. Léon Gaumont tried to recruit Capellani, which shows the standing he enjoyed in the film industry

The shift from titles on lantern slides to the practice of titling on the film itself dates to the turn of the 20th century. Early examples of preserved filmed titles are rare, but occasional advertisements can be found in the UK in catalogues of James Williamson (1899) and Robert William Paul (1901), and in France in a catalogue of the Parnaland film company (1901). Although evidence shows that Pathé was using this technique in 1901, catalogues from its British branch reveal that it advertised it from May 1903. The advertisements highlighted positive outcomes for producers and exhibitors, and promoted titles in a variety of languages. This early titling strategy allowed Pathé to get ahead of its competitors in terms of industrialisation, control over its product, and domestic and foreign market share. This chapter focuses on early filmed titling and intertitling practices, Pathé’s innovative offer in 1903, and its evolution until 1908.

As the film business developed to become a substantial industry, Paul remained a leading and respected figure, helping to create a manufacturers’ association that would protect members’ interests and aim to raise standards of production and presentation. He took an early interest in the issue of defining film copyright, and was central to consultation about how to respond to Pathé unilaterally lowering its prices in 1903. By 1908 British producers faced sustained challenge from Pathé, now a multinational company, and from Edison, seeking to form a cartel that would exclude them from the North American market. Tension between producers and exhibitors probably contributed to Paul’s decision to leave the film business in 1909, after attending two Paris conferences which failed to produce overall agreement on terms of business.

When Albert Edward Walsh was 18 years old, he left home for the adventures he so craved—the fantasies movies are made of. Yet the stories that the soon-to-be renamed “Raoul” Walsh would write and direct were already taking shape around him. Thomas Walsh married Elizabeth Brough in 1886 in a ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral. One year later, their first child, Albert Edward, was born. His brother, George, was born in 1889, and a sister, Alice, was born two years later. Walsh always recalled his childhood as being a magical time. But all his childhood fantasies, real or imagined, came crashing to a halt in 1902, when his mother, Elizabeth, only 42 years old, died of cancer. He got a job in 1907, which turned out to be for a traveling show of The Clansman. Most of the films Walsh made for the Pathé brothers were westerns. Frustrated with them and the company's operation, he knew there was a better way to meet the dream he had set out for himself. Little did he know that he was about to take a giant step toward it.

Raoul Walsh's life in the early 1910s escaped being documented; the “truth” may be fiction, or it may be a story with more embellishment than fact. Christy Cabanne was making a name for himself with D. W. Griffith at Biograph. Cabanne advised Walsh not to sign a new contract with Pathé. He wanted him to come act for D. W. Griffith's company and to consider himself hired. The time was right for Walsh to move to Biograph, even if the stay was a brief one. The train heading for Los Angeles carried another Biograph feature player, an attractive actress named Miriam Cooper—and, before Walsh truly had time to settle into what eventually became his luxurious Los Angeles lifestyle, Cooper would change her name to Mrs. Raoul Walsh. Griffith signed the notorious Mexican bandit Pancho Villa to a one-picture deal. Walsh got involved in the Villa project and shot footage of the famous Mexican renegade in Mexico. The Villa adventure only enhanced Walsh's appeal to the women in the Griffith Company. Given all his success in California, Walsh summoned his brother, George, to come west to act for Fine Arts.

This chapter is concerned with the new demands, opportunities, and limitations of the medium of film as it attempted to capture theatrical performances in the early days of sound. During the early 1930s, it is interesting to see the impact on performers when they move from a theater stage to a film studio and are faced with a camera instead of a live audience. Four Pathé musical shorts have been chosen as case studies, and they are representative of three musical genres: music hall, operetta, and cabaret. These films contain performances by the Cockney music-hall comedian Gus Elen, the light-operatic tenor Richard Tauber, and the cabaret artist Greta Keller. These early musical shorts are valuable in showing how singers confronted a new audiovisual medium and tried to mould their performances appropriately.

This chapter describes Sweatman’s recording career. In December 1916 Sweatman visited the studios of the Emerson Phonograph Company in midtown Manhattan and cut the first jazz records. On the strength of his reputation in vaudeville, he was asked to record two numbers. One was a popular song of the day, “My Hawaiian Sunshine,” on which Sweatman was accompanied by a studio band; the other title was his own “Down Home Rag.” Jazz is heard for the first time on record on the latter title. In 1917 Sweatman recorded six sides for the Pathé Frères Phonograph Company and recorded for Columbia in the 1918–20 period. His band can also be heard, albeit anonymously, on the Little Wonder record label.

This chapter focuses on Dulac's wartime activism and literary writings, as well as the debut of her film career—from her first activities as a film producer for Pathé (La Lumière du coeur, 1916) to her first directorial efforts (Soeurs ennemies to Le Bonheur des autres, 1917–18)—and evaluates the historical significance of her incursion into and negotiated course within the French film industry as a female artist and entrepreneur. A close examination of archival sources documenting Dulac's early professional activities provides insight into her humanist egalitarianism, universalism, and her strong belief in the emancipatory potential of art, as well as her early rhetorical strategies.

This chapter examines the fate of Pearl White's serials on the Swedish market during the early 1900s. More specifically, it analyzes the impact of censorship on White's films, and American serial films in general, in Sweden. Aside from censorship imposing stringent regulations on crime serials, traditional forms of marketing diluted the impact of the format and upset the chronology for the episodes, undercutting the popularity of the serial queens. Despite all the hype concerning her international following, White was never perceived as a truly big star in Sweden, mainly because only a selected few of her films actually made it to Swedish audiences. Out of her eleven serial films, only The Perils of Pauline and the three Exploits of Elaine serials were screened in Sweden. Furthermore, none of the Swedish copies have survived. The chapter also discusses Pathé Frère's impact on the Swedish film industry.

This chapter examines the Pearl White phenomenon on the French market, with particular emphasis on the French influence on Pathé Frère's American serial films and the obvious resemblance between the Pauline character and the French athlete, mountaineer, and aviator Marie Marvingt. Also known as “the fiancée of danger,” “the most important woman in France since Joan of Arc,” and “the universal sportswoman,” Marvingt was already familiar to the American audience by the time The Perils of Pauline was released in 1914. The parallels between the stories of White and Marvingt suggest that the former's popularity among French audiences was not simply due to some exotic fascination for the peerless modernity of the American New Woman, but was instead rooted in some very familiar experiences of feminine heroism. This chapter also explores White's forerunners as well as emulators in the French serial genre from Musidora to Protéa.

This chapter details how Ted Wharton got into the entertainment business. The early years that Ted spent on and behind the stage gave him an invaluable introduction to virtually all aspects of the entertainment industry, especially to the performance and production of melodrama. They also taught him the technical and improvisational skills that would serve him well as he graduated from vaudeville performance and legitimate stage acting to direction of film shorts and production of serials, particularly since he was often experimenting as he developed the conventions and devices that would become staples of later cinema and television. Ted's interest in the motion picture industry was further aroused by his visits to the old Edison Studios in Manhattan, after which, on his own, he began writing screenplays that revealed his aptitude for the craft. He then joined Pathé Frères to assist in the opening of its American studio and then to serve as its director. In late 1911 or early 1912, Ted decided to leave the company for a better opportunity at another studio: Essanay. The chapter then looks at Ted's most thematically and technically sophisticated short for Essanay, From the Submerged (1912), which is now considered one of the masterpieces of silent film.

This chapter discusses how Leo Wharton got into the film industry. Leo's earliest documented stage appearance was in 1893, in the play The Fairies' Well. After a few years of itinerant acting, Leo was able to secure steadier employment at the Hopkins Grand Opera in Saint Louis, where his brother Ted was already performing. As part of Colonel Hopkins's theatrical company, Leo assumed various stage roles in the popular daylong “continuous performance” programs that Hopkins pioneered, which combined live drama and between-the-acts vaudeville. Leo's first known (and first credited) film appearance was in the title role of Lincoln in Abraham Lincoln's Clemency (1910), a photoplay produced by Ted Wharton for Pathé. The role not only garnered good reviews for his sympathetic performance and even for his resemblance to the revered figure whom he was portraying; it also led to an offer as a director for Pathé, the studio for which Ted was then working. There, Leo began directing similar shorts, such as the period historical drama The Rival Brothers' Patriotism (1911). Since early movie audiences seemed especially fond of marital comedies, Leo produced several shorts in 1913 that revolved around wedding-day complications. While these and other short pictures that Leo produced for Pathé were often predictable in their plotting and formulaic in their execution, they were nonetheless popular with audiences and profitable for Pathé. Moreover, they established his reputation in the industry.

This chapter examines a large number of actualités - short non-fiction films from the early history of cinema - set in the Scandinavian Arctic. Exemplifying with early documentaries made by primarily Swedish and French film companies, including Pathé Frères, Svenska Biografteatern, Svensk Kinematograf and Svensk Filmindustri, Dahlquist discusses the exoticization and racialization of the Sámi population that were constituent of the these early films. Such tropes, Dahlquist shows, were common also in other forms of visual mass media at the time, exhibits at the Stockholm open-air museum Skansen included. The chapter traces production, distribution, circulation, and reception history of these films. Dahlquist also presents key thematic and visual components of Victor Sjöström’s silent drama film Daughter of the Peaks (1914).

At the turn of the 1910s, French production companies produced a large number of popular-science films. This chapter provides a comparative analysis of popular-science films produced by Pathé, Gaumont, and Éclair. This survey leads to a detailed analysis of a number of films, especially Le Scorpion Languedocien, whose borrowings, particularly from Jean-Henri Fabre’s ethological writings, serve as an example of the frequent intertextual links that characterize this kind of filmmaking. The chapter also contains a discussion of recurring tendencies in the French popular-science films of this period, which frequently involve animal violence. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how popular-science films were programmed in multiple-film programs.