Hollywood in the 1930s, Poetic Realism,Japanese Cinema in the 1930s
Jaakko Seppälä
http://www.helsinki.fi/taitu/tet/Jaakko/WorldFilmHistory1.html
Hollywood’s Depression Age
• The stock market crash of 1929 (Black Tuesday) led to the Great Depression
• The depression caught up with the film industry in 1931 (1930 had been a boom year)
• People had little money for film tickets• Hollywood fought the depression with double bills and
B movies• Wall Street’s involvement increased in the 1930s• The National Industrial Recovery Act went into effect
in 1933
The Production Code
• In 1930 the president of the MPPDA Will Hays authorised the drafting of the production code
• Code enforcement was rather lax and inconsistent until late 1933 (pre-code films)
• The Production Code Administration led by Joseph Breen began to regulate movie content
• PCA approval was required on all scripts before production and then on the finished film
• Hollywood’s self-censorship set the boundaries for what could be seen, heard or even implied on screen
The Studio System
THE BIG FIVEParamount
Loew’s (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)Twenties Century Fox
Warner Bros.RKO
THE LITTLE THREEUniversal, Columbia, United Artists
Hollywood Cinema in the 1930s
• The era of the movie palace came to an end• Methods of sound recording improved: unidirectional
microphones, light booms, multiple-track recording, new camera support (dolly)
• Technicolor introduced a new system in the early 1930s• The 1930s saw the began of the golden age of
Hollywood cinema (the age of the genre film)• Major genres of the 1930s: the musical, the screwball
comedy, the horror film, the social problem film, the gangster film, the war film
French Cinema in the 1930s
• French studio system was weak but it offered filmmakers flexibility and freedom
• Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert and Pathé-Natan • A period of well-defined film genres and industrial
structures, and a time when the cinema was the main form of popular entertainment began in the 1930s
• Spoken French increased the popularity of the national cinema
• Hollywood films still dominated the market• Emigrant filmmakers arrived from Germany
French Poetic Realism
• Poetic realism was not a unified movement but a looser tendency
• Realism: films are set in working class environments and characters live on the margins of the society
• Poetic: pessimistic narratives about love and disappointment, tone of nostalgia and bitterness, night-time settings, dark and contrasted visual style
• Films reflect the gloomy morale of the 1930s• Major films: Le Grand Jeu, Pépé le Moko, La Béte
Humaine, La Règle du jeu, Les Enfants du paradis
Japanese Cinema in the 1930s
• A benshi = a person who explained the filmic image to the audiences
• Japanese cinema resisted the transformation to synchronised sound
• The biggest companies: Nikkatsu, Shochiku and Toho• Hollywood films did not overshadow domestic production• The director and scriptwriter had a considerable control
over their projects• Directors were encouraged to specialise in certain genres
and to cultivate personal styles
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