Singeetam Srinivasa Rao, in a 2010 interview to The Hindu, recalled Madras’ link with cinema. As we fight disinformation and misinformation, and keep apace with the happenings, we need to commit greater resources to news gathering operations. I began taking mental notes for it when I first discovered silent films. Meiyappan, founder of AVM Studios, says in the book AVM 60, that it was the only studio at the time to have realistic special effects equipment to simulate rain and storm effects in films. That occurred in 1968 when I was nine years old. Those readers looking for a more informally presented but still rigorous introduction to silent film should consult The Bioscope, a blog on silent film research and appreciation containing fourteen hundred entries searchable by topic and theme. Because of their more elaborate production values, features had relatively higher negative costs. 2d ed. The episodic crime film was pioneered by Victorin Jasset in the Nick Carter series, produced for the small Éclair Company, but it remained for Gaumont’s Louis Feuillade to bring the genre to aesthetic perfection in the extremely successful serials Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915–16), and Judex (1916). Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. The silent revolutionary. Lavishly illustrated with over four hundred rare images drawn from the Library of Congress. At Pathé Frères, director general Ferdinand Zecca perfected the course comique, a uniquely Gallic version of the chase film, which inspired Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops, while the immensely popular Max Linder created a comic persona that would deeply influence the work of Charlie Chaplin. This circumstance would become an issue during the 1920s, when the movies became a mass medium that was part of the life of every U.S. citizen and when Hollywood became the chief purveyor of American culture to the world. For readers who wish to understand the way that academic film historians since the 1980s have come to divide silent era filmmaking into multiple historical and stylistic periods, Thompson 1985 offers a useful point of entry. Delayed by countersuits and by World War I, the government’s case was eventually won, and the MPPC formally dissolved in 1918, although it had been functionally inoperative since 1914. Saravanan, son of the legendary film producer A.V. These silent films are perfect for the language classroom as they can be used with any level – the teacher just needs to adapt the difficulty of the task to match the level of the students. As there was no such outlet, I began to contemplate the feasibility of a magazine solely devoted to the silent era. Kobel, Peter. It’s a support for truth and fairness in journalism. This article looks at those studies that take a broad view of the silent era, both those that predate the trend toward reperiodization and those more contemporary studies that look across a substantial portion of the three and a half decades of the silent years and encompass multiple historical and stylistic periods. As a result of the nickelodeon boom, some exhibitors—who showed three separate programs over a seven-day period—had begun to require as many as 20 new films per week, and it became necessary to put production on a systematic year-round schedule. It began with L’Assassinat du duc de Guise (“The Assassination of the Duke of Guise,” 1908), directed by Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes of the Comédie Française for the Société Film d’Art, which was formed for the express purpose of transferring prestigious stage plays starring famous performers to the screen. Metropolis, German silent film, released in 1927, featuring director Fritz Lang’s vision of a grim futuristic society and containing some of the most impressive images in film history. Before the new studio-based monopoly could be established, however, the patents-based monopoly of the MPPC had to expire, and this it did about 1914 as a result of its own basic assumptions. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Trust company producers used this kind of publicity after 1910, when Carl Laemmle of Independent Motion Pictures (IMP) promoted Florence Lawrence into national stardom through a series of media stunts in St. Louis, Mo., but they never exploited the technique as forcefully or as imaginatively as the independents did. However, we have a request for those who can afford to subscribe: please do. Before World War I, European cinema was dominated by France and Italy. The rise and fall of the MPPC was concurrent with the industry’s move to southern California. Silent Cinema. The studios in Madras were advanced and had expensive special equipment. Exhibitors quickly learned that features could command higher admission prices and longer runs; single-title packages were also cheaper and easier to advertise than programs of multiple titles. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. The Italian superspectacle stimulated public demand for features and influenced such important directors as Cecil B. DeMille, Ernst Lubitsch, and especially D.W. Griffith. Madras was a thriving epicentre for not just Tamil films but also for those in all south Indian languages, with its state-of-the-art facilities and visionaries who introduced several firsts in film-making. Thompson, Kristin. The new viewers also had a more refined sense of comfort, which exhibitors quickly accommodated by replacing their storefronts with large, elegantly appointed new theatres in the major urban centres (one of the first was Mitchell L. Marks’s 3,300-seat Strand, which opened in the Broadway district of Manhattan in 1914). Harpenden, UK: Oldcastle, 2010. They were all independent exhibitors and distributors who had outwitted the Trust and earned their success by manipulating finances in the postnickelodeon feature boom, merging production companies, organizing national distribution networks, and ultimately acquiring vast theatre chains. As for manufacturing, producers found that the higher expenditure for features was readily amortized by high volume sales to distributors, who in turn were eager to share in the higher admission returns from the theatres. Courtesy Filmarchiv Austria. By 1915 approximately 15,000 workers were employed by the motion-picture industry in Hollywood, and more than 60 percent of American production was centred there. Revised and expanded from its original publication under the title Burning Passions in 1991. Still, readers who are new to the study of silent film and looking for a place to start can find some useful titles, both new and old. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. While her periodization has been refined and further subdivided by later scholars, readers interested in understanding how film historians since the 1980s have approached the silent cinema might start here. An engaging, richly illustrated, and amusingly argumentative survey of silent film colored by the personal reflections and recollections of a pioneering collector, archivist, and silent film enthusiast who was the founder and curator of the famed motion picture archive at the George Eastman House. These included the temperate climate required for year-round production (the U.S. An intercut is a type of edit where two or more actions in distinct locations are edited together into one scene.David Wark Griffith was an early adapter of intercutting, using the technique as early as 1909.D.W. Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture. 4 Titles after 1928 are included for other reasons. Everson, William K. American Silent Film. Printable version | Oct 5, 2020 1:13:20 PM | https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/from-silent-films-to-the-digital-era-madras-tryst-with-cinema/article32476615.ece. S.S. Vasan’s Gemini Studios came up on Mount Road, Vijaya Vauhini Studios in 1948 at Kodambakkam and in 1949, A.V. Silent Lives took me a while to complete -- almost forty years, in fact. More personal reflection than scholarly history, Card 1994 presents a loving look at the era of silent film by an archivist and film collector who dedicated much of his life and career to preserving the works of that era, many of which he first saw as an adolescent during the 1920s. Please subscribe or login. You have reached your limit for free articles this month. This latter factor enabled the newly arrived production companies to buy up tens of thousands of acres of prime real estate on which to locate their studios, standing sets, and backlots. As a subscriber, you are not only a beneficiary of our work but also its enabler. Its successor, the Italia company’s 12-reel Cabiria (1914), was even more extravagant in its historical reconstruction of the Second Punic War, from the burning of the Roman fleet at Syracuse to Hannibal crossing the Alps and the sack of Carthage. Meiyappan shifted AVM studios from Karaikudi to a 10-acre campus, again in Kodambakkam. The one idea the October revolution definitely gave us was the notion that a film is made in the editing suite as much as on the set. London: British Film Institute, 2000. The most powerful companies in the new film capital were the independents, who were flush with cash from their conversion to feature production. Brownlow, Kevin. Bringing together both film-goers and film traders, the South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce was inaugurated in April 1939. The war years and post-World War II trends, The youth cult and other trends of the late 1960s. Until then, one had to go to Bombay or Calcutta to produce films but in 1934, Srinivasa Kalyanam became the first talkie produced in Madras. Get kids back-to-school ready with Expedition: Learn! “The success of the two films made producers look for new locations to film their stories. Multiple-reel films had appeared in the United States as early as 1907, when Adolph Zukor distributed Pathé’s three-reel Passion Play, but when Vitagraph produced the five-reel The Life of Moses in 1909, the MPPC forced it to be released in serial fashion at the rate of one reel a week. By 1914, however, several national feature-distribution alliances that correlated pricing with a film’s negative cost and box-office receipts were organized. The film, which was set during the Great Depression, centres on a luckless factory worker (played by Chaplin) who finds himself True to his statement, rapid developments were seen in the next few decades. The silent years, 1910–27 Pre-World War I American cinema. Mount Road (Anna Salai) became a hub for theatres, with Elphinstone theatre, Gaiety Cinema and later, Anand and Shanti theatres. . Film historian and writer Venkatachalam said two films — Annakili and 16 Vayadhinile — were highly influential among film-makers. The Parade’s Gone By. The details of such periodization can vary significantly between scholars, but one overarching effect is that the term “silent film” has become less frequently used by academic film historians as a viable catchall, given the term’s potential to elide significant differences across cinema’s first decades. Subscribe to The Hindu now and get unlimited access. One impact of this reevaluation has been the periodization of silent cinema into a series of distinct historical stages, each with its own prevailing stylistic features and reigning social dynamics. Brownlow’s work predates and is out of step with most current scholarship, but the personal interviews with over one hundred silent era directors, producers, and stars give the book an enduring value. From Silent Film Quarterly Issue 1: The idea for Silent Film Quarterly stemmed from a personal desire to write articles about silent films. Includes a dedicated chapter on silent comedy and one on silent era scandals; individual descriptions and analyses for some of the major silent films; and an overview of major print, online, and DVD resources for studying silent cinema. While theatres have remained shut since March, the buzz around OTT platforms and the varied content they have is yet another turning point. It was soon clear that what producers required was a new industrial centre—one with warm weather, a temperate climate, a variety of scenery, and other qualities (such as access to acting talent) essential to their highly unconventional form of manufacturing. Soon, a transformation ensued — movies that were being made in the confines of the studios began to be shot in real locations. This was a disadvantage to distributors, who charged a uniform price per foot. These new exchanges demonstrated the economic advantage of multiple-reel films over shorts. Chennai-based Real Image Media Technologies (now Qube Cinema Technologies) was at the forefront of this change. An accessible guide for beginners, organized thematically rather than historically. An automobile parts dealer who turned his attention to cinema, R. Nataraja Mudaliar set up the The Indian Film Company studio in Madras in 1916, and went on to make the first silent film in south India, Keechaka Vadham. 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