May 2020 | Sight&Sound | 23By Bryony Dixon
It’s hard to believe that 1920, the year that
heralded that dazzlingly ‘modern’ decade, is now
a hundred years ago. The stuffy proprieties of the
Victorian world were gone: this was the era of
the rebellious young – the Jazz Age, with bobbed
hair, flappers and Prohibition, career-minded
young women, Hollywood and the Harlem
Renaissance. It was the age of the film star and the
feature film – the queen of cinema formats, which
drew audiences to cinemas around the world.
America was in the ascendant, with its
studio system on the rise, but the Old World
was producing great works. Robert Wiene’s
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was arguably the
first art film, the first horror film, and the first
cinematic product of German expressionism. It
engendered a host of other creepy, psychological,
historical dramas and a century-long love
affair with the gothic horror film – four others
(The Golem, Januskopf, Algol, From Morning to
Midnight) followed in the space of a year.In Britain and America, melodrama had lost
none of its power to pull in audiences. D.W.
Griffith’s Way Down East, in which Lillian Gish is
trapped on a vast moving ice-floe, demonstrated
his talent for spectacle, while in Britain Eliot
Stannard, the scriptwriter who would be such
an influence on the young Alfred Hitchcock,
was twisting the plot of the classic 19th-century
‘sensation novel’ Lady Audley’s Secret into
fiendishly clever filmable form. In a bold move,
the film gives away in its first frame the book’s
surprise ending – an indication of how much
fun you can have when you give an audience
privileged knowledge while letting the characters
within the film play out the plot in ignorance.
Hitchcock would learn this lesson well.
Revealing the interior mechanisms of the
human mind was the particular project of
the French film impressionists. In this year
Marcel L’Herbier produced L’Homme du large, a
fascinating, highly stylised adaptation
of a Balzac short story, with artisticallyACROSS THE
CENTURY
PRIMAL SCREEN
The year 1920 marked the beginning
of modern cinema, with The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari the most famous
among a host of remarkable filmsWide Angle
EXPLORING THE BIGGER PICTURE1