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| A scene from 1927's Wings, which won the award for Outstanding Picture at the first Academy Awards. |
With my review of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, I have now reviewed 49 Best Picture Winners (with an asterisk for Sunrise) out of a total of 98, putting me at the midpoint of this project. So this seems like a good moment to take a look back before moving forward.
One thing that this tour of (English language) film history has brought home to me is what a young medium motion pictures are. There are people who are alive now who had already been born when Wings and Sunrise were released. I'm only about halfway through, and this point will be a fair bit short of the midpoint by the time I fully catch up. Even so, I have already reached movies released within my lifetime, some of them ones that I wouldn't have considered "old" when I first viewed them.
EARLY FILM HISTORY AND PRE-HISTORY:
Film itself far predates the Academy Awards. Inventors experimented with creating moving images from mulitple static ones from the first half of the 19th century through devices such as the phenokistascope, later improved into the zoetrope. Thomas Edison (more accurately, his employee William Dickson)'s kinetoscope, invented in 1893, allowed exhibition of a film reel to a single viewer via a "peep box." But it was only with the creation of the Lumière Brothers' cinématographe in 1895 that mass exhibition became possible.
To all intents, motion pictures began with that invention, with the rest basically being prehistory. Now, 1895 is outside of living memory... but not by all that much, and it wasn't until after the turn of the 20th century that filmmakers started to deliver more complex narrative films, such as Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery and Georges Méliès's Le Voyage dans la Lune. The latter of which saw Thomas Edison become the first significant movie pirate by selling his own prints of Méliès's film under the English title, A Trip to the Moon, without permission, payment, or credit.
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| The Kelly Gang performs a robbery in one of the few surviving scenes from this 1906 feature. |
The first recorded feature-length film was Australia's The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), a 70 minute narrative film of which roughly 17 minutes still survive; a restoration was released by Australia's National Film and Sound Archive in 2006, combining the existing clips with still photos to recreate the original movie as closely as possible (National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/story-kelly-gang).
It was D. W. Griffith's 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation, that revolutionized film technique... sadly, in the service of what amounts to a 3-hour recruitment film for the Ku Klux Klan. I've already written about its content (link). The film was simultaneously a product of, and a fuel for, the period of history that historians have dubbed the nadir of American race relations.
Divorced of that content, however, The Birth of a Nation was a technical marvel. A lot of film language we take for granted can be traced to this motion picture: intercutting close-ups and long shots within a scene; fade-outs to show transitions in time and place; and large-scale battle scenes using a variety of methods to convey carnage, including the use of still frames to make living actors seem like lifeless corpses. Its content is odious - but its technical achievement is indisputable, and it fully merits its place in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.
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| The Broadway Melody is an "all-talking" film... meaning the camera doesn't move and the actors barely do. |
FROM SILENT TO SOUND:
All of this history is a prelude to the very first thing I noticed in this review series - namely, the way film technique actually moved backward with the introduction of sound.
Silent film was already on its way out by the time of the first Academy Awards ceremony. Wings and its twin "Best Unique and Artistic Motion Picture," Sunrise, would be the only silent films to win Best Picture until 2011's The Artist. The contrast in filmmaking sophistication between these two silent films and the early talkies that followed is jaw-dropping. Save for featuring synchronized sound, the Best Picture recipients from The Broadway Melody to Cavalcade seem far older and creakier than the two silent winners.
The reasons for this have to do with early sound recording technology, which Fiveable's article, Technological and Artistic Challenges of Early Talkies, observes was as cumbersome as it was expensive. Cameras had to be encased in soundproof booths to avoid recording the sound of the camera itself, which limited camera movement, while actors had to remain close to microphones to capture clear audio. The resulting films feel almost painfully primitive and static.
Filmmakers did their best to push against these limitations. The Broadway Melody cuts regularly between different camera setups to try to keep some sense of visual motion, and it pioneered the technique of dubbing singing over musical numbers rather than recording the songs live. Cimarron and All Quiet on the Western Front feature set pieces that were "shot silent," with sound later dubbed over, allowing individual sequences to draw on the wealth of tools that had been perfected before the introduction of sound. All Quiet was one of several early talkies that simultaneously shot a silent version. The silent version still exists, and it's often regarded as the better one, not having to contend with the limited camerawork and the sometimes stilted line deliveries.
I also couldn't help but notice how many early talkies feature elements of silent film, from exaggerated, overly emotive acting (Cimarron is very guilty of this) to intertitles. In hindsight, the run of Best Picture Winners up to 1934 plays like a transitional period, with filmmakers gradually learning how to best use the new sound technology, as well as how to minimize the limitations imposed by it.
The motion picture as an artform seems to regain its confidence in the mid-1930s. Frank Capra's It Happened One Night uses the advantages of synchronized sound to smoothly cut into action while it's in progress and cut out at high points, creating a faster pace than many of its contemporaries. The Great Ziegfeld, for all of its self-indulgence, features a then-extraordinary $250,000 set piece, a mid-film performance of A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody on a giant revolving set, that remains eye-popping.
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| 1939's Gone with the Wind sees the movies finally catch back up with the technical mastery of the silent era. |
CATCHING UP WITH THE PAST - GONE WITH THE WIND:
1939's Gone with the Wind saw the motion picture industry finally "catching up" with the technical mastery of its silent era.
There is a certain irony to this. Silent film's revolutionary leap forward came with Birth of a Nation, a Civil War/Reconstruction epic that is deeply, blatantly racist. Sound film's revolutionary release that saw a full return to technical mastery came with Gone with the Wind, a Civil War/Reconstruction epic based on a novel by Margaret Mitchell - whose own favorite novel, The Clansman, formed the basis for Birth of a Nation.
It should be noted that, unlike its pro-KKK predecessor, Gone with the Wind avoided any deliberate racism on the insistence of David O. Selznick. The novel's references to the Klan were removed entirely from the movie, along with racial slurs. The film's most prominent black character, Mammy (Hattie McDaniel), is a fully-realized character who is arguably one of the best-written characters in the movie.
Gone with the Wind is a better movie than Birth of a Nation on a basic story and character level. It also offers several indelible moments: The shot that begins close on Scarlet; then, still moving to follow her, gradually pulls back to reveal a sea of wounded soldiers. The set piece that is the burning of Atlanta. The intimate and perfectly-edited moment in which Scarlet shoots a deserter, then rifles through his pockets for anything that can help her and her people survive.
As I noted in my review, for its first three hours, I was positive I would be awarding full marks. I ended up giving it an "8," mainly because its final hour suffered from a narrowing of scope and direction by Sam Wood that simply was not the equal of the scenes helmed by Victor Fleming or George Cukor. The movie as a whole, however, fully lives up to its reputation as a technical and artistic achievement, and it represents the point at which the visual art of motion pictures caught up with its own past and began to once again move forward.
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| 1922's The Toll of the Sea was made using Technicolor's early two-strip color process. |
FROM BLACK & WHITE TO COLOR:
After silent-to-sound, the next major transition was from black & white to color. From 1927 to 1950, the only color movie to win Best Picture winner was Gone with the Wind.
Now, color was not remotely new, not even in the 1930s. Many early silent films had sequences that were colored by hand, frame-by-frame; some restorations replicate the process, including Wings with its colored flames during the aerial dogfights. Meanwhile, Technicolor utilized a two-strip color recording process, which was used for the entirety of 1922's The Toll of the Sea. This process was also used for individual sequences, big set pieces in movies such as the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments and the 1925 Ben-Hur.
The early Technicolor processes were cumbersome, though, as well as expensive. Also, like early sound, early color introduced limitations. The Artifice notes in its article, A History of Colour: The Difficult Transition from Black and White Cinematography, that cameras were so heavy that outdoor shooting was impossible. The article also notes the need for extremely bright lighting, limiting the use of shadows and restricting complex camera work.
Talkies imposed even greater restrictions, of course... but audiences quickly demanded talking films. The same audiences were perfectly satisfied with black & white, however, and so the expensive and cumbersome color process was saved for a few, lavish exceptions.
As the technology improved, color became more affordable, more effective, and less restrictive. The 1950s saw a steady increase in color motion pictures, and this was reflected in the Oscar winners. 1951's An American in Paris was only the second color movie to win Best Picture. After 1956's Around the World in 80 Days, however, 1960's The Apartment was the only black & white film to win the award until Schindler's List in 1993.
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| The Apartment (1960) was the last black & white film to win Best Picture until Schindler's List in 1993. |
REFLECTING THE TIMES:
The one constant, throughout this series (and, really, any other decades-spanning look at artworks) is one that I've circled back to in multiple reviews and assorted musings: that the films in this series very much reflect the times in which they were made.
This is visibly true throughout the span of this review series. I've written about how portrayals of African-Americans on film reflected racial attitudes between 1915 and 1939; how views toward sexuality led to the fall of the Hays Code and the rise of the MPAA ratings; and how a turbulent social period overlaps a time in which the musical suddenly dominated the Academy Awards. The movies that are the most popular and/or honored often don't hold up as the actual best of their respective years - but movies, good and bad alike, always reflect something of the times that created them.
CONCLUSION:
I think it's appropriate that my look back comes here, not only because it's the current midpoint of this series, but also because the next Best Picture winner will be 1976's Rocky. If my memory holds true (and it hasn't been all that long since my last viewing), the first Rocky is very much a '70s film, but it also signals a shift in the overall tone of major motion pictures that would carry through into the following decade.
Past that, I have no particular conclusion here. I really did just want to blow off the cobwebs a bit by looking back at the first half of this review series before starting to move forward again.
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