Edwin Porter The Great Train Libery

As a silent film, Buster Keaton’s The General relied mostly on facial expressions and imagery. This resulted in exaggerated emotions and action packed visuals. Film was fairly new at the point of The General’s release, and films that could be projected to entertain wide audiences had only come into existence around 1895. The General uses it’s stunts and narrative filled with action, romance, and comedy to capture the audience's attention, without sound.

When Thomas Edison asked Edwin S.Porter to make The Great Train Robbery (1903) little did either realise that this film would be the beginning of not only the Western genre but an entire movie industry. The silent classic, The Great Train Robbery depicts a famous railroad robbery by a notorious

“If any act symbolized the taming of the Northwest frontier, it was the driving of the final spike to complete the nation’s first transcontinental railroad.”1 The first railroad west of the Mississippi River was opened on December 23, 1852. Five miles long, the track ran from St. Louis to Cheltanham, Missouri. Twenty-five years prior, there were no railroads in the United States; twenty-five years later, railroads joined the east and west coasts from New York to San Francisco.2

Society is constantly changing at the speed of light. In the industrialized society we live in today, it is no surprise that people show such disregard for the past. Consequently, many people also fail to see the consequences of being too reliant on technology. The art to literature pair, “Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad(1925)” by Edward Hopper and Edward Hirsch portrays people’s disregard for the past as new innovations arise. Edward Hopper implements a wide variety of visual effects like shading, color choice, and angling into his painting, House by the Railroad, 1925 to emphasize the house’s abandonment as a result of societal change. In addition, Edward Hirsch’s poem, “Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad(1925)”,

Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest (1959) is famed as a classic man-on-the-run thriller, following protagonist Roger Thornhill as he flees across state lines in a mad dash to save his life and unravel the mystery to his extraordinary predicament. However, mid-way through the film Thornhill’s quandary is further complicated by the introduction of Eve Kendall, a beautiful yet mysterious woman he encounters on a train during his escape from the authorities and people trying to kill him. During the dining room scene on the train, Hitchcock expertly uses the camera to convey the characters thoughts and feelings. Interestingly, in a film that has several sequences with complicated cinematography and editing, the dining car scene is

The form of Classical Hollywood films is, first and foremost, invisible. In a Classical Hollywood film, the narrative is foremost, and style serves the narrative. Camera angles, lighting and editing patterns such as the shot/reverse-shot pattern aim to give us the best possible perspective on the unfolding events(1). These events are arranged in a strongly causality-oriented linear narrative, with one event causing the next. This narrative is arranged around a central, active protagonist, whose decisions and actions are the key to the pattern of cause and effect that drives the story(2). This pattern seems so logical, so natural, that the audience of the classical Hollywood film is

A set of practices concerning the narrative structure compose the classical Hollywood Paradigm. These conventions create a plot centering around a character who undergoes a journey in an attempt to achieve some type of goal (). By giving the

In the first half of the 19th Century the working class in the newly industrializing American society suffered many forms of exploitation. The working class of the mid-nineteenth century, with constant oppression by the capitalist and by the division between class, race, and ethnicity, made it difficult to form solidarity. After years of oppression and exploitation by the ruling class, the working class struck back and briefly paralyzed American commerce. The strike, which only lasted a few weeks, was the spark needed to ignite a national revolt by the working class with the most violent labor upheavals of the century.

The first half of this course focused on Alfred Hitchcock and how his techniques are now recognized as iconic. From class discussions and film screenings, it is clear that Hitchcock pays every attention to detail when he crafts a scene. Many Hitchcock films we have seen this semester highlight how he builds suspense through cinematic elements such as shadow, dialogue, and composition. While many of his suspenseful scenes stir feelings of intensity and uncertainty, Alfred Hitchcock builds a more romantic suspense in his 1955 film To Catch a Thief in the fireworks scene (1:06:35-1:11:00).

Movies were becoming one of the biggest businesses during the 1920s and most people would spend their leisure time going to the theatre to watch the silent films. They were becoming huge in the popular culture and Hollywood was the place to be. Roughly by 1922, 40 million people a year in attendance over the entire country for the movie theatres and in 1930 over 100 million people would attend the movies every year. By 1927, the movie industry became the fourth largest industry in the country. “The Great Train Robbery” which was released in 1903 was the beginning of the film industry and would eventually change everything. “Jazz Singer” was the first movie that had synchronized sounds throughout the entire film. The popular genres during this decade were western,

He was the academy winning Western legend, recognized as one of the best filmmakers of all time, his name was John Ford. He started out his career in film in July 1914 as an assistant, labourman and actor for his brother Francis Ford. It was not until 1917 where he made his debut as a director with the lost film, The Tornado and ended his career in the early 1970s with his last film Chesty: A Tribute to a Legend. During his early years, he was making silent films where Westerns were very popular during the time. When the introduction of sound came and the birth of Talkies came, however, the genre started losing its popularity. Yet, that did not stop the director from working on the genre, eventually to the point where he is now credited today as the man who played a huge role in bringing the westerns back to popularity. So, in this video essay, I will be talking about John Ford’s take on Westerns and how he revolutionized the genre.

(Wiki) These norms involve the use of specific devices to “establish three main interrelated systems: narrative logic (causality), cinematic time, and cinematic space.” (Wiki or Book) Welles’s use of a classical narrative structure, a film style indicative of the classical Hollywood style along with emphasis’s on continuity and cause through editing and writing come together to produce a beautiful model of the form and style indicative of classical cinema.

The Motion Picture changed everything. The very first movies were rather basic, showing everyday routines such as the arrival of a train or female workers leaving a factory. The very first “action” film was The Great Train Robbery (1905) which had a simple yet thrilling plot about cowboy bandits and their attempt to steal money from a moving train. Then several Westerns adapted the same basic plot, and some even moved it further. In the 1930’s the Noir and Gangster movies such as Little Caesar (1931), Scarface (1932), and The public Enemy (1931) became immensely popular, and these films normally had a rather violent story, many of them were inspired by real gangsters. Then Came the forties and the fifties, which were mostly passive eras on

Early cinema is often referred to as a progression to narrative cinema, Tom Gunning would argue that it was not a progression but had its own purpose and coined the term The Cinema of Attractions in his essay ‘Now you see it, Now you don’t’. This is the concept that a large quantity of the first film makers produced films that were more about the spectacle, most of the films leading up to 1900 reflected the fascination with technology and how things happened rather than why. Gunning noted that there were three assumptions of film; the general ideas that people had about the timeline of film and where it would end up. There is the cinematic assumption, the idea that film was ‘restricted to the technological reproduction of theatre’ (Gunning T.1993) early cinema was primitive and only a practice for what was to come. The narrative assumption is that film is ‘only important as it is a predecessor to a more engaging and effective form of film,’ (Gunning T. 1993) this suggests that narrative cinema is the natural form of film. The final assumption is the idea that ‘cinema only truly appeared when it discovered its mission of telling stories.’ (Metz C. 1974) These assumptions all encompass the idea that narrative is the end form of film. In this essay I am going to discuss Tom Gunning’s theory of The Cinema of Attractions and the differences between them and narratively driven films.

Hollywood cinema is primarily subjected to telling stories. The inclination of Hollywood narratives comes not just from good chronicles but from good story telling. The following essay will discuss Hollywood’s commercial aesthetic as applied to storytelling, expand on the characteristics of the “principles of classical film narration” and evaluate alternative modes of narration and other deviations from the classical mode.