Hollywood style, the ascendance of Hollywood as
the center of the world’s motion-picture industry,
the development of movie genres, and early exper-
iments with color and animation.
The “classical Hollywood cinema”^8 refers here to
the traditional studio-based style of making motion
pictures in both the silent and sound periods.
Although the rudiments of the classical style can be
seen in the work of Edwin S. Porter, it began its
ascendancy with the release of D. W. Griffith’s The
Birth of a Nation(1915) and continues, with various
modifications, to identify the cinematic conven-
tions used by most filmmakers today.
The classical Hollywood style is fundamentally
built on the principle of “invisibility” that we dis-
cussed in Chapter 1. This principle generally
includes two parts. The first is that the movie’s
form (narrative, cinematography, editing, sound,
acting, and so forth) should not call attention to
itself. That is, the narrative should be as economi-
cal and seamless as possible, and the presentation
of the narrative should occur in a cinematic lan-
guage with which the audience is familiar. The sec-
ond part is the studio system itself, a mode of
production that standardized the way movies were
produced. Management was vertically organized,
meaning that a strong executive office controlled
production, distribution, and exhibition; hired all
employees, including directors and actors; and
assigned work to them according to the terms of
their contracts, thus ensuring a certain uniform
style for each studio. While we know that such
principles were sometimes ignored in practice,
they nonetheless serve a purpose in helping us
chart the course of stylistic history. Thus, for exam-
ple, we can understand and appreciate just how
radical Orson Welles’s approach was in Citizen
Kane(1941) when he deliberately called attention to
technique and in so doing, challenged the perceived
limitations of the classical Hollywood style and the
studio system itself.
By 1907, a small film effort started in and around
Hollywood, lured by the favorable climate and vari-
ety of natural scenery. While its founders were
nearly all uneducated immigrants, their business
practices were consistent with the ruthless tactics of
other Gilded Age entrepreneurs. D. W. Griffith made
his first movie there in 1910; in 1911, the first studio
was built, and by 1912, some fifteen film studios were
operating; by 1914, the American film industry was
clearly identified with Hollywood. As a forward-
looking sign of this growth, the industry invested
heavily in movie theaters, some of which were
dubbed “palaces” for their imposing architecture,
lavish interiors, and seating for hundreds, some-
times thousands, of people. It also established other
“firsts,” including trade journals, movie fan maga-
zines, movie reviews in general-circulation newspa-
pers, the star system, and a film censorship law.
During this period, filmmakers began to replace
short films (generally one reel in length) with
feature- length movies (four or more reels). The
term “feature” came to mean major works that
stood out on a program that might include shorter
films as well. In these early days, the length of one
reel was 10– 16 minutes, depending on the speed of
projection. The longer format not only permitted
filmmakers to tackle more complicated narratives
but also placed an emphasis on the quality of the
production, including mise- en- scène, cinematogra-
phy, acting, and editing. The growing middle class
audience liked longer narratives and more polished
productions and was willing to pay more to see
such movies. Accordingly, producers could book
them for extended runs and, of course, make more
money. The transformation of the nickelodeon into
the movie palace— which exceeded in splendor any
legitimate theater and thus had an attraction all
its own— further established the cinema as a seri-
ous artistic endeavor. Thus, with changes in a film’s
length, content, quality, and exhibition, came the
first major restructuring of the movie industry. The
second was to come with the advent of sound and
the third with the development of the independent
system of production. Thus the movies took on the
modern production system and the cinematic con-
ventions that, however much they have changed,
we know today.(^8) A concept popularized by film scholars David Bordwell,
Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger, in The Classical Holly-
wood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960(New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
A SHORT OVERVIEW OF FILM HISTORY 441