History of Cinema: Early Cinema to the Classical Hollywood Era

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering Weeks 1 through 8 of cinema history, including early cinema, narrative development, German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, 1920s Hollywood, technological advancements, race cinema, and Hollywood studio genres.

Defamiliarization

The artistic technique of making the familiar strange or difficult so that it can be seen in a whole new way, changing a narrative to present a new approach.

Cinema of Attractions

A term used to describe films produced before 1907 that were created not as narrative entertainment, but as spectacular imagery presenting audiences with sensuous thrills akin to late 19th-century public attractions.

Actuality Films

Short, non-fiction films made from 1985-1908 that were not structured to communicate a narrative or argument, rarely featured edits, and were used as an observation of everyday life.

Solax Studios

A film studio co-founded in NYC in 1908 by Alice Guy Blache following her move to the United States, utilizing color, hand tinting, and the chromophone for sound.

The Transition Period (1907-1913)

A transitional era in film characterized by greater character individuation, demand for elaborate mise-en-scene, the displacement of cinema of attractions by visual storytelling, and the emergence of literary and theatrical adaptations.

Stereoscopic Photography

A photographic method that uses two side-by-side images to create the appearance of three dimensions.

Slapstick

A style of cinematic humor that relies on exaggerated physical comedy.

Bauhaus

An art movement formed at the end of WW1 lasting until roughly 1933, whose primary objective was to bring together different forms of arts and craftwork into a cohesive whole.

The Shadow

A psychoanalytic concept formulated by Carl Jung positing that the subconscious has a darker side of repressed elements that project involuntarily onto the world, existing as both a personal shadow and a collective shadow.

The Weimar Republic

A city in central Germany that served as a center for art, literature, and poetry, used to describe a vibrant culture of artistic experimentation that ended in 1933.

German Expressionism

A film movement lasting from 1918 to 1933 characterized by production design that reflects the subconscious and the filmmaker's psychological state through harsh shadows and deep contrast.

Chiaroscuro

A technique creating a strong contrast between light and dark, rooted in Renaissance painting and heavily employed in German Expressionism and inspired film movements.

UFA

A major German film studio established in 1917 that fostered the careers of domestic directors as well as visiting directors from other European countries.

City Symphony

A genre of silent films focused on capturing a 'day in the life' portrait of an urban environment.

Montage

An editing technique used to manipulate the perception of time, alter the rhythm and tempo of events to trigger visceral responses, and generate visual metaphors to elicit meaning.

Continuity Editing

A style of editing, also called 'invisible editing,' that seeks to establish logic, smoothness, sequential flow, and temporal and spatial orientation for the audience.

The Kuleshov Effect

A film editing concept demonstrating how the placement of an insert shot alongside other images can alter viewer reactions and emotional interpretation.

Agit-prop

Short for agitational propaganda, referring to special trains equipped with portable theater carriages that traveled across Russia following the revolution.

Metric Montage

A form of editing where cuts are made based strictly on units of time or shot length, regardless of what occurs within the clip.

Rhythmic Montage

A form of shot assemblage determined by both visual content and shot duration.

Tonal Montage

A montage technique that advances beyond metric and rhythmic cutting by assembling shots based on their emotional meaning.

Overtonal Montage

The synthesis of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage methods working together to provoke an emotional and physical change in the audience.

Intellectual Montage

A film editing technique that juxtaposes two or more seemingly unrelated shots to generate a completely new concept or idea.

The Kino Eye

A newsreel film series created by Dziga Vertov in 1924 aimed at capturing daily life unromanticized and uninterrupted by formal cinematic devices.

Vertical Integration

An industrial studio structure where production, distribution, and exhibition reinforce one another under unified corporate control.

Production Designer

A cinematic job title coined by art director William Cameron Menzies while working across studios such as Famous Players Lasky, Paramount Pictures, and MGM.

Paratect

Elements exterior to a film, filmmaker, or film studio that serve to control and shape the audience's reception of films.

The Big Five

The five dominant major Hollywood studios consisting of Paramount, Warner Brothers, RKO, MGM, and Twentieth Century Fox.

The Little Three

The three secondary Hollywood film studios consisting of Universal, United Artists, and Columbia Pictures.

Poverty Row

A term designating lower-budget production studios that operated outside the traditional major Hollywood studio system.

Revista Theater

Short for teatro de revistas (theater of reviews), a turn-of-the-century popular theater practice oriented toward social and political commentary whose performers migrated into Hollywood sound and music in the 1930s.

Color Theory

Competing philosophies and ideas regarding how colors in motion pictures and other visual media shape perception and emotional responses.

Pre-code Films

Motion pictures produced prior to the strict enforcement of the Hays Code self-censorship guidelines in 1934.

Hays Code

A Hollywood code of self-censorship implemented in 1934 in response to industry scandals and protests from groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency, adopted to prevent government intervention.

Technicolor

A motion picture color process first utilized in 1916 that relied on color strips and dye transfers to produce rich, vibrant color palettes.

The Lincoln Motion Picture Company

An African American film production company founded in Omaha, Nebraska in 1916 before relocating to Los Angeles the following year.

Race Movies

Films produced between roughly 1914 and the 1950s made by African American filmmakers for Black audiences to emphasize human complexity.

The Great Migration

The historical relocation of African Americans from the American South to the Northeast and West Coast between roughly 1910 and 1970, driven by Jim Crow laws, violence, and changing economic conditions.

Genre Memory

Mikhail Bakhtim's concept that narrative works continuously reinvent themselves across history by remembering past conventions while utilizing present resources to create something new.

Block Booking

A studio distribution practice requiring independent theater owners to buy an entire year-long slate or block of films in order to secure desirable titles.

The Lumière Brothers

French cinema pioneers whose 1896 film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station demonstrated early actuality filmmaking through framing, staging, repetition, and performance.

Georges Méliès

Pioneering French illusionist and director whose anti-realist films employed stop tricks and special effects to make the impossible appear real on screen.

Alice Guy-Blaché

Pioneering Gaumont filmmaker who directed The Fairy of the Cabbages (1896) and argued that motion pictures should tell structured stories with a beginning, middle, and end.

Star Film Company (Texas)

A Texas-based film production branch founded by Gaston Méliès to shoot regional Westerns and capitalize on Southwestern landscapes.

Pre-Cinematic Los Angeles Visual Culture

A regional visual landscape founded on stereoscopic photography, landscape painting, promotional tourism, and architecture that primed California for place substitution.

Mack Sennett

Canadian-born comedy producer who founded Keystone Studios in Echo Park in 1912 and popularized slapstick physical comedy and Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin Studios

An independent Hollywood film production lot built in 1917 to grant its founder total creative and industrial autonomy over his films.

Cultural Roots of the Western

Dime novels, touring Wild West shows, frontier paintings, and nineteenth-century national mythologies of the American frontier.

Cultural Roots of Screen Horror

Gothic literature, European folklore, magic lantern phantasmagoria shows, and Grand Guignol theatrical melodrama.

Cultural Roots of Screen Comedy

Vaudeville stages, traveling circus acts, English music halls, and comedic opera traditions.

Cultural Roots of the Crime Genre

Sensational urban tabloid journalism, serialized detective fiction, and late nineteenth-century city melodramas.

Villa Aurora

A Pacific Palisades residence that served as a historic refuge and intellectual salon for German and European artists living in exile during the Nazi era.

Fritz Lang

Austrian-born UFA director, civil engineer, and WWI veteran who shaped German Expressionist cinema with films like Metropolis before fleeing Germany.

Lotte Reiniger

German animator who pioneered silhouette cutout animation and directed the oldest surviving animated feature film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926).

Vladimir Propp

Russian formalist folklorist who argued in Morphology of the Folktale that all traditional fairy tales share a universal sequential structure.

Roman Jakobson

Structuralist linguist and theorist who asserted that narrative communication operates primarily through comparison (metaphor) and association (metonymy).

Viktor Shklovsky

Russian literary theorist who coined the term ostranenie (defamiliarization), asserting that artistic techniques serve to make the ordinary strange and heighten perception.

Kino-Fist

Sergei Eisenstein's editing principle contrasting Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye, asserting that cinema should actively shock and manipulate viewers rather than merely record daily life.

Carl Laemmle

German Jewish immigrant and pacifist who founded Universal Pictures in 1912, created Universal City, and launched adaptations of literary classics and monster movies.

Ars Gratia Artis

A Latin phrase meaning 'art for art's sake,' adopted as the studio motto of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer alongside its roaring lion emblem.

Columbia Pictures Industrial Strategy

A 'Little Three' studio model that operated without owning a theater circuit, instead financing lower-budget productions and distributing to independent exhibitors.

Dorothy Arzner

Pioneering Hollywood studio director who became the first woman to direct a sound film, devised an early boom microphone on The Wild Party, and later taught at UCLA.

Dracula (1931, Tod Browning)

A pre-Code Universal horror feature whose visual atmosphere and lead performance by Bela Lugosi permanently established the iconic cultural image of the vampire.

Dracula (1931, George Melford)

A Spanish-language horror adaptation produced simultaneously at night using the same sets and script as Tod Browning's day production, starring Lupita Tovar.

Lupita Tovar

Mexican actress who starred in George Melford's Spanish-language Dracula and starred in Santa (1931), Mexico's first synchronized sound feature film.

Golden Age of Mexican Cinema

A flourishing production era from 1933 to 1964 built around sound technology, international distribution, and production facilities like Estudios Churubusco.

The Jazz Singer (1927)

A landmark Warner Bros. feature containing synchronized musical and talking sequences that accelerated the film industry's rapid conversion to sound technology.

Within Our Gates (1920)

An independent silent drama written and directed by Oscar Micheaux, depicting racial violence and social realities as a direct rebuttal to The Birth of a Nation.

United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948)

A landmark Supreme Court antitrust decision ordering major studios to divest their theater chains, outlawing block booking and dismantling vertical integration.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Studio Style

A major studio aesthetic renowned for high production values, soft-focus cinematography, lavish Art Deco art direction, prestige literary titles, and technicolor fantasy.

Warner Bros. Studio Style

A major studio aesthetic distinguished by fast-paced editing, hard-boiled realism, ripped-from-the-headlines social problems, and urban gangster pictures.

RKO Pictures Studio Style

A major studio noted for sophisticated screwball comedies, Astaire-Rogers musicals, low-budget Val Lewton horror films, and releasing early Walt Disney features.

Twentieth Century Fox Studio Style

A major studio recognized for historical epics, American frontier westerns, biographical dramas, and the later commercial development of widescreen CinemaScope.

Phantasmagoria

A late 18th-century spectacle form in which frightening or ethereal images were projected from a concealed magic lantern device onto walls, smoke, or screens.

Panorama Paintings

Large-scale 360-degree spectacle artworks originating in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, designed to encircle viewers within specially constructed circular exhibition rotundas.

Eadweard Muybridge

English-born photographer and naturalist who pioneered motion capture in the 1870s by using multiple synchronized cameras to analyze human and animal locomotion, also did the famous horse sequence.

Edwin S. Porter

Early American filmmaker and director at Edison Manufacturing Company who advanced cinematic narrative and cross-cutting with The Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery.

Thomas Edison

Prolific American inventor whose West Orange, New Jersey laboratory developed essential early motion picture apparatuses such as the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope during the 1890s.

Étienne-Jules Marey

French scientist and chronophotographer who invented the photographic rifle in 1882 to record successive phases of motion onto a single photographic plate.

"Colonel" William Selig

Pioneering producer who established Selig Polyscope Company, produced California's first dramatic feature (The Count of Monte Cristo), and built an early permanent studio in Los Angeles in 1909.

Edendale

The historic Los Angeles district encompassing parts of present-day Echo Park, Silver Lake, and Los Feliz that served as the primary early center for major silent studios such as Keystone and Selig Polyscope.

Tally's Electric Theater

A pioneering Los Angeles exhibition venue opened in 1902 in downtown Los Angeles, widely recognized as one of the first permanent storefront theaters established exclusively for projected motion pictures.

Buster Keaton

Silent film comedian and director known as 'The Great Stone Face' for his deadpan expression, performing daring physical stunts in films like Sherlock Jr. (1924) and The General (1926).

Biograph Company

Prominent American studio founded in 1895 that relocated west in 1910, prioritizing refined dramatic performance and launching key industry figures like D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Lillian Gish.

Inceville

A pioneering proto-studio ranch founded in 1911 in Santa Ynez Canyon by Thomas Ince, featuring an early factory production model and extensive permanent outdoor standing sets.

Famous Players-Lasky

A major film production company formed in 1916 through the merger of Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky's organizations, later reorganizing into Paramount Pictures in 1927.

Epic

A film genre or period drama characterized by grand scale, monumental visual spectacle, lavish production values, and sweeping historical or mythological narratives.

Movie Palaces

Lavish, cavernous cinematic exhibition houses built across American cities during the late 1910s and 1920s that offered working- and middle-class patrons luxurious architectural grandeur akin to European opera halls.

The Shadow (Jungian Shadow)

A psychoanalytic archetype formulated by Carl Jung denoting the repressed, unacknowledged, or darker aspects of the unconscious mind that project involuntarily onto the external world at both personal and collective levels.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Foundational German Expressionist work directed by Robert Wiene about an insane hypnotist using a somnambulist to murder, renowned for its distorted sets, painted lighting, and allegorical reflection on postwar authority.

Metropolis (1927)

Monumental science-fiction film directed by Fritz Lang and scripted by Thea von Harbou, portraying a stark division between wealthy rulers living above and exploited laborers below, incorporating Bauhaus and Futurist design.

M (1931)

Early sound thriller directed by Fritz Lang starring Peter Lorre as a serial killer hunted by both police and the criminal underworld, serving as an allegorical commentary on mass hysteria and rising totalitarianism.

Convergence Culture

A media theory framework describing the flow of content across multiple platforms, where traditional and new media systems collide through an interplay of top-down corporate production and bottom-up participatory audience engagement.