Середня загальноосвітня школа №35
м. Дніпропетровська
Hollywood and its influence on Ukrainian and Russian cinematography
Дослідницька робота
Учениці 11-А класу
Новосьолової Ксенії
2012 р.
Plan:
I. Introduction___________________________________________________2
II. Hollywood cinematography _____________________________________3
Classical Hollywood cinema________________________________3
Style ___________________________________________________6
Production______________________________________________7
Periodization____________________________________________8
Summary_______________________________________________9
III. Ukrainian and Russian cinema_________________________________10
Ukrainian cinema________________________________________10
Russian cinema (Mosfilm)_________________________________19
IV. Russian cinema before and after Hollywood influence______________25
V. Hollywood’s Russian roots _____________________________________30
VI. List of literature _____________________________________________36
I. Introduction
Every day of our life we watch TV – it is something like a habit of our ordinary life, many of us even can’t start their morning without cup of coffee and good news program. We like watching film, don’t we? Comedy, horrors, tragedies, thrillers – the wide choice let us to spend our time with maximum comfort and pleasure. But who makes it?
No doubts that you have heard about Hollywood – the capital of cinematography, as the famous cultural workers say, and exactly it is the main theme of my research work. I’ll try to tell you all dimension of Hollywood starting from its own individual sound and visual features and ending with its influence on the other countries’ art, especially Ukrainian and Russian.
In my opinion, this topic is very interesting to be discussed and actual enough to be paid attention because in our age of technologies and advanced entertainment we anyway face films, as a part of national culture development. So, you should know more about Hollywood and its inspiration at least for broadening of yours outlook and in the better situation to understand the things as they are and to come to the conclusion about Hollywood’s significance on the international scene and in our native cinematography.
II. Hollywood cinematography
1. Classical Hollywood cinema
Classical Hollywood cinema or the classical Hollywood narrative, are terms used in film history which designate both a visual and sound style for making motion pictures and a mode of production used in the American film industry between roughly the 1910s and the early 1960s.
Classical style is fundamentally built on the principle of continuity editingor "invisible" style. That is, the camera and the sound recording should never call attention to themselves (as they might in films from earlier periods, other countries or in a modernist or postmodernist work).
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the end of the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s to the early 1960s, movies were prolifically issued by the Hollywood studios. The start of the Golden Age was arguably when The Jazz Singer was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films. Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a genre—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio.
(pic. 1)
(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer logotype)
After The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, Warner Brothers gained huge success and was able to acquire their own string of movie theatres, after purchasing Stanley Theatres and First National Productions in 1928; MGM (pic. 1) had also owned a string of theaters since forming in 1924, known as Loews Theaters, and the Fox film Corporation owned the Fox Theatre strings as well. Also, RKO, another company that owned theaters, had formed in 1928 from a merger between Keith-Orpheum Theaters and the Radio Corporation of America.
RKO formed in response to the monopoly Western Electric's ERPI had over sound in films as well, and began to use sound in films through their own method known as Photophone. Paramount, who already acquired Balaban and Katz in 1926, would answer to the success of Warner Bros. and RKO, and buy a number of theaters in the late 1920s as well, before making their final purchase in 1929, through acquiring all the individual theaters belonging to the Cooperative Box Office, located in Detroit, and dominate the Detroit theaters. For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films, Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. DeMille's films were almost all made at Paramount, director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth-Century Fox, etc.
Movie making was still a business, however, and motion picture companies made money by operating under the studio system. The major studios kept thousands of people on salary—actors, producers, directors, writers, stunt men, crafts persons, and technicians. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across America, theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material.
In 1930, MPDDA President Will Hays also founded the Hays (Production) Code, which followed censorship guidelines and went into effect after government threats of censorship expanded by 1930. However the code was never enforced until 1934, after the new Catholic Church organization The Legion of Decency - appalled by Mae West's very successful sexual appearances in She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel - threatened a boycott of motion pictures if it did not go into effect, and those that didn't obtain a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration had to pay a $25,000 fine and could not profit in the theaters, as the MPDDA owned every theater in the country through the Big Five studios.
Throughout the early 1930s, risque films and salacious advertising, became widespread in the short period known as Pre-Code Hollywood. MGM dominated the industry and had the top stars in Hollywood, and was also credited for creating the Hollywood star system altogether. MGM stars included at various times "King of Hollywood" Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper, Mary Pickford, Henry Fonda, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Grace Kelly, Gene Kelly, Gloria Stuart, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck, John Barrymore, Audrey Hepburn and Buster Keaton. Another great achievement of American cinema during this era came through Walt Disney's animation. In 1937, Disney created the most successful film of its time, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
(pic. 2)
