1994: 100 Years of Motion Pictures


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The Silver screen, A Golden Past 1994: 100 Years of Motion Pictures Radio Netherlands 1 – “Beyond the magic lantern”, a look at silent film Moving pictures were a sensational, new visual experience when first seen at the Grand Café in Paris on December 28, 1895. From the time the Lumière brothers pioneered the technology, cinema in its earliest years tried to reproduce the real world, exposing the public to places and people and science and news they could otherwise only read about or see in photographs. But by 1908-9, fiction, stories and narrative took over. For film-makers this was more cost-effective and allowed them to reconstruct visual scenes of events people could not possibly experience otherwise, such as a posse chasing bandits. And it was all very much more real and sophisticated than the flickery black-and-white silent images we tend to associate with this era. Hollywood created a dream factory for masses of immigrants aspiring to a better, even glamorous, life. The Russian masters of montage created the first political propaganda art films, and the huge German film industry created the first conflictual, uneasy  psycho-dramas of expressionism. There was something for everybody. And there was Charlie Chaplin. Producer: Dheera Sujan Broadcast: January 6, 1994 02 “Garbo talks, Gilbert doesn’t”, The advent of sound cinema A new branch of cinema art was born when sound was introduced, but at first it was reserved only for music and singing, as in the 1927 Al Jolson classic “The Jazz Singer”. Sound was considered vulgar at first and dismissed as having no future. Even Charlie Chaplin waited until 1936 to introduce sound in his masterpiece “Modern Times”. But it was a revolution that would change the industry forever, boosting the careers of performers like Greta Garbo, destroying the careers of others, like her great love John Gilbert and the many local musicians who provided silent films with live accompaniment. It was a costly technique, especially when multi-lingual versions had to be made. There were even German and French versions of Laurel and Hardy movies. In the end this forced movie moguls to think creatively of how to cover the expenses and make profits, which later went into other major cinema innovations like technicolour (“The Wizard of Oz”), the star system and the new technology of dollies from Germany. France, Italy and Japan also emerged as major film cultures during this boom time for cinema. In the United States, the  Depression later brought stricter morals, even puritanical rules, but Hollywood being Hollywood, there were always tantalizing ways to get around that. Producer: Dheera Sujan Broadcast: January 13, 1994 03 Celluloid myths: The femme fatale Eve started it all, and women have never been able to live it down since: seductress, tempter, destroyer of men’s lives. There were the sirens who lured sailors to jump overboard by the beauty of their voices. There was Helen of Troy, the cause of a great war. There was the fatal attraction of the women in film noir who played games of double cross, manipulating men to do their evil deeds for them. The Church would have women silent. Medieval cultures wanted their women locked into chastity belts because in the end, the only difference between a “good” woman and a “bad” woman was sex. But sex has been oozing out from the silver screen almost since its conception: Theda Bara and Mae West, Marilyn and Sharon Stone. And let’s face it – aren’t these broads a whole lot more fun than their milk faced counterparts, the “good girls”? Producers: Dheera Sujan & Michele Ernsting Broadcast: 18 February 18, 2000 04 “Cinema paranoia”, the 40’s and 50’s As the world struggled to emerge from the World War, this period of cinema history saw a splash of colourful, energetic films come out of Hollywood—especially wonderful musicals. “An American in Paris” was the first musical ever to win an Oscar, with Gene Kelly and the movies revolutionising the staging of dance. At the same time, however, Hollywood started seeing a steady decline in ticket sales. Anti-trust decrees broke the power of the big studios, while the McCarthy era and the Cold War Red Scare brought both shame and menace to Hollywood, with the blacklisting of movie-makers said to be communists and less than ethical methods to control labour unrest. No wonder then that a new genre emerged — the film noir — reflecting a darker, more pessimistic vision of the world that nevertheless resulted in great art. “Citizen Kane”, created by Orson Welles, for example, is to this day considered one of the best movies ever made. Hollywood’s troubles gave European film-makers space to grow. These years saw the emergence of “la nouvelle vague” (the new wave) in France and neo-realism in Italy, and in England directors like David Lean created their first masterpieces. In  Asia, Indian cinema moved beyond the happy splashiness of masala films to the work of Satyajit Ray, now considered one of the 20th century’s greatest directors, while Japan’s Akira Kurosawa stunned Venice, Hollywood and the world with his first great international success, “Rashomon”. The silver screen now also created a new image of male and female passion and seduction, literally embodied to this day by cinema icons like Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. Producer: Dheera Sujan Broadcast: January 27, 1994 05 “Tune in, turn on, drop out”, The 60’s and 70’s With the continued decline of the big Hollywood studios, there was not only more space but also a greater need for independence. The 60’s saw film become more political, old moral conventions broke down and revolution was in the air. Yet a family-friendly movie like “The Sound of Music” actually saved 20th Century Fox from bankruptcy. A number of big films attempting to repeat its success sometimes failed while others, like the controversial and experimental counter-cultural masterpiece “Easy Rider” made more than one hundred times the low budget it was given. In the 60’s the centre of film-making shifted from the U.S. to Europe, where directors like Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut captured audiences with art and intellect. European cinema owed a great deal by this time to American film, and it visually admitted it, for example, in the spaghetti western. In Asia, Bollywood treated its audiences to glamorous, kitchy and unrealistic fun, while Taiwan and Hong Kong gave us Bruce Lee and finely choreographed martial arts movies. In the 70’s, the ball rolled back into the American court, where directors like Martin Scorsese and   Steven Spielberg created the Hollywood Renaissance. Producer: Dheera Sujan Broadcast: February 3, 1994

This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.