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 Broadway Melody (Beaumont, 1929)

Scarface (Hawks, 1932)

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

The Black Pirate (Parker, 1926)

The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939)

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

The Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)

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

Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956)

Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963)