This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 01 Oct 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: CRC Press Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK Animation: A World History Volume I: Foundations—The Golden Age Giannalberto Bendazzi The Silent Pioneers (1908–1928) Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.1201/9781315721057-3 Giannalberto Bendazzi Published online on: 17 Nov 2015 How to cite :- Giannalberto Bendazzi. 17 Nov 2015, The Silent Pioneers (1908–1928) from: Animation: A World History, Volume I: Foundations—The Golden Age CRC Press Accessed on: 01 Oct 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.1201/9781315721057-3 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. 3 THE SILENT PIONEERS (1908–1928) The Cradle Europe was almost intact on the western side but was com- pletely new on the eastern one. Austria had become a small Days of Heaven and Hell country; Poland was independent again after more than 120 years; independent again, although territorially muti- Politically, economically, and militarily, the first fourteen lated, were Hungary and Ireland; a new republic combined years of the twentieth century were the continuance of the the Czech and the Slovak peoples; a new kingdom tried to century before. The only novelty was the dawning of Japan glue together, under the name of Yugoslavia, Serbs, Croats, as a modern power after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Slovenes, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and vari- the annexation of Formosa (which later became Tai- ous minorities; and Albania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and wan) in 1896, the victorious war against Tsarist Russia in Finland made their debut on the international stage. 1904–1905, and the conquest and colonization of Korea Germany and Austria-Hungary had lost the war, but in 1910. everybody in Europe lost peace. The global map was only slightly and peripherally Economies were out of breath. Great Britain started to retouched according to new colonized areas or because realize that her gigantic empire was more expensive than of changes of influence (since 1898, for instance, after profitable; France suffered from a chronic political instability; having defeated Spain, the United States has exercised a and Italy fell into a fascist dictatorship. After the Bolshevik de facto protectorate on Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and coup d’état and a civil war (1917–1920), Russia had become the Philippines). In 1901, Australia became independent; everybody’s bugbear. Her new name was the Union of the in 1910, Mexico was the scene of the first revolution of Socialist1 Soviet Republics, and until the late 1920s her pro- the century, with many social and political implications; ject was to expand the proletarian revolution to the whole and in 1911, the Chinese Empire became the Chinese planet. The threat was real: In many states, communist par- Republic. ties were active and had well-organized groups of devotees. In the developed countries, the middle class was in such The United States, whose intervention in 1917 had tipped full bloom that the era was called the Belle Époque. the scale in favour of England and her allies, eventually dis- On 28 June 1914, in Sarajevo (Bosnia), a student agreed with European politics and chose isolationism. She by the name of Gavrilo Princˇip assassinated Archduke enjoyed a good economic situation and experienced excit- Franz Ferdinand of Habsburg, heir to the throne of the ing times that were called the Roaring 1920s, the Jazz Age, Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Viennese Chancellery or the Lawless Decade – depending on the standpoint. regarded the government of Serbia, Princˇip’s country, as responsible. A month later, the chancellery declared a war that would become the largest slaughter in history up to Culture that point in time. Six or seven years later, after the end of World War Intellect ran a different course. Most revolutions took I and the signature of various peace treaties, the map of place before World War I. In 1900, Sigmund Freud 1 Why ‘socialist’ instead of ‘communist’? According to Marxist principles, ‘socialist’ is the temporary system that eventually leads to a ‘communist’ society. Of course, democratic socialist parties such as the British Labour Party gave the word a very different meaning. Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 20:19 01 Oct 2021; For: 9781315721057, chapter3, 10.1201/9781315721057-3 30 Chapter 3: The Cradle published The Interpretation of Dreams and Max Planck Cinema developed quantum theory; in 1903, Ivan P. Pavlov dis- covered conditioned reflexes; in 1905, Albert Einstein The world of film expanded vigorously, too. Production introduced the theory of relativity, while Fauvism (Mat- companies stopped aiming at an illiterate and proletar- isse, Derain, and Vlaminck) was marking French paint- ian audience, as middle-class customers proved that they ing and the artistic movement Die Brücke was founded considered cinema as entertaining as legitimate theatre. in Dresden. In 1907, Pablo Picasso painted Les demoiselles Movie houses began to replace itinerant shows more and d’Avignon, starting cubism, and Georges Braque enthu- more, distribution became a well-organized profession, siastically seconded him; in 1908, Wilhelm Worringer and the star system gained a footing. published Abstraktion und Einfühlung – Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsy- By 1915 (the year of David W. Griffith’s The Birth of a chologie (Abstraction and Empathy: Essays in the Psychology of Nation), the cinema of attractions had given way to clas- Style, one of the most widely read books on the theory sical cinema (or the cinema of institutions). By the end of art); in 1908, Arnold Schönberg started atonal music, of the 1920s, cinema was already considered the Sev- 3 the first phase of dodecaphony (and in 1908, Émile Cohl enth Art, and some masterpieces had already made their created Fantasmagorie). In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Mari- mark, including Charlie Chaplin’s shorts and features The netti published the ‘Futurist Manifesto’2; in 1913, Marcel Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925); Robert J. Flaherty’s Proust published Swann’s Way, the first tome of his In Search Nanook of the North (1921); Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s of Lost Time. In the same year, Igor Stravinsky wrote The Nosferatu (1922), The Last Laugh (1925), and Sunrise (1927); Rite of Spring, Ferdinand de Saussure wrote the Course in Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925); Buster General Linguistics, and Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore Keaton’s The General (1927); Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion was given the Nobel Prize. of Joan of Arc (1928); and King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928). The rush would slow down but not stop. During the Within this general outline, silent animation matters for war, James Joyce, Luigi Pirandello, Franz Kafka, and the specialists only. Although some good animated films Vladimir Mayakovsky published their works; various art- were made, the phenomenon as a whole was little more ists founded the Dada movement; and Piet Mondrian and than a curiosity. Theo Van Doesburg founded De Stijl. After the war, Wal- ter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar and Ameri- can writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Narrative and Non-Narrative Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O’Neill, and later Francis Scott Fitzgerald (the ‘lost generation’) gathered in Paris. Handbooks tell us that the cinema of attractions was In 1922, poet Thomas S. Eliot published the verses of The based on non-fiction films, while the classical cinema was Waste Land and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pub- based on narrative and narrative language. The shift took lished his Tractatus logico-filosoficus; one year later, another more a decade, but little by little audiences were driven to German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, published Being agree that consecutive scenes meant various moments of and Time. In 1923, Lu Hsun published his collected short the same action; that a close-up didn’t imply that the actor stories with the title of A Call to Arms. Surrealism was born had been beheaded; that an iris in/iris out signified the in 1924, the same year as George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in passing of time or a change of place; and so on. In other Blue and the first jazz orchestra conducted by Duke Elling- words, via trial and error, an alliance of audiences and ton. German physicist Werner Heisenberg developed the filmmakers created the special visual (later audiovisual) uncertainty principle in 1927. language of cinema. 2 Futurism was unique in that it existed entirely on paper some time before any actual works were produced. It was, in fact, not only an artistic but also a cultural, political, and ethic movement, and the Manifesto was basically a harangue. Its aim became the repre- sentation, by distorting and disarranging images, of the ceaseless activity and confusion of modern urban life. It was an age in which intoxicating new forms of transport and communication – bicycles, motorcycles, cars, express trains, planes, ocean liners, the telegraph, the telephone – seemed to be transforming the globe and even the human race. The initial futurist exhibition opened in Paris in Febru- ary 1912, eliciting outraged criticism, and then went on a tour of northern European capitals, taking in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Brussels, from which news of the movement rapidly spread, soon reaching the United States, Russia, and Japan.