MITOCW | watch?v=m4ZuXay_qOo The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. DAVID All right. Hello people. Welcome back to the second week of our course. I'm happy to have this THORBURN: wonderful live audience. But I also would like very briefly to address our video audience, who will no doubt be watching this long after I'm dead on MIT's OpenCourseWare. So think of this as a voice from the grave. You and the video audience will sometimes notice that as I'm lecturing to this lively group, I will turn this way and look up. You should realize that what I'm turning toward and looking up at is this projection screen, which we will show you. And it sometimes has this outline on it, which hopefully guides us through each lecture and sometimes has other information and material on it. Sometimes it isn't worth shifting over to show the video audience that image. But that's what I'm looking at when I look so strange. I'd like to begin today by taking a step back, by reminding you that the order in which we're watching the movies in this course is a little bit arbitrary because I wanted to use the feature films as the defining date. And that's the reason that we made Keaton come first because The General is an earlier film. It was almost a decade earlier than Modern Times. But the truth is Chaplin entered film before Keaton. And Keaton had certain advantages by the time he entered the movies, in part because of Chaplin's example, although also because of the fairly complicated way in which silent film had already elaborated itself after the first 10 years or so of the 20th century. So I want to take a step back into that early phase, just before Chaplain becomes a filmmaker really in 1911, I think is when he joins the Keystone Studios. Just to remind you of a story that is told systematically in David Cook's History of Narrative Film, which is part of our required reading in the course. And I hope you will attend especially to the details Cook offers about those early years in Hollywood. If you read those chapters from Cook about the early years of Hollywood before Chaplin, the movies before Chaplin, you'll recall that one of the most fundamental things that happens before Chaplin even appears is the establishment essentially of the industry I was describing last time. The migration to the West Coast is worth mentioning. Because movies, of course, begin their career in the United States on the East Coast. Edison's first movie studio was in East Orange, New Jersey. The Biograph Company was originally located on the East Coast. And almost all the original earliest films, even the earliest films that were put into production and shown commercially, were made on the East Coast. Why did people move to the West Coast? Why did Hollywood become the sort of center of the movie industry? What explains it? It happens very early. One might think of it as a very important moment in the history of culture, of popular culture, because for all the changes that the movie industry has undergone, Hollywood remains the kind of center of what is now a kind of global enterprise of movie making. What helps to explain the move to the West Coast? Nothing fancy. In the back, yes. AUDIENCE: Film year around. DAVID They could film the year around. Why is that important, especially in the early days? THORBURN: AUDIENCE: You can make movies whenever. You don't have to produce them in the summer. DAVID Yes. You're not as dependent on the weather. The Sun always shines in California. If it's THORBURN: overcast, you can still film. And there's no snow. There's virtually no rain. The weather is very conducive to the making of film. And especially in this early phase, when film stock was relatively primitive compared to the complexity of film stock we have-- today, the film stock is so subtle that you can film in the dark. You can film by fire light. Even amateur folks owning camcorders can film virtually in the dark. They can film by electric light inside a room. Or tape, they can videotape in that way. In the earliest days of film, you needed a tremendous amount of light to expose the film. And what it meant that you were dependent on the weather. So that was one major reason. But there's another one that's even more important in some ways, even though that would seem a sufficient reason for explaining why the migration to the West Coast occurred. There's another even more powerful one. It has to do with the idea of patent warfare. Yes. What's your suggestion? You don't have to give the right answer. Give a-- AUDIENCE: Different types of terrains fall into those-- DAVID Oh, that's also true. Yes. The environment of Southern California is particularly conducive to a THORBURN: variety of film projects. There are mountains nearby. There's ocean nearby. There's desert nearby. And, of course, that's also something that makes it a uniquely valuable environment. Maybe not a unique environment, but a particularly valuable environment. And that's a good answer. And you're right about that. But there's something else. And it has to do with conditions in the East and Thomas Edison. Remember, Edison in a certain way wanted to lay claim to virtually every invention in the early part of the 20th century. And he was primed to do so. He was already recognized as a great genius, as the premier entrepreneurial inventor of his era. And he immediately, as he had done with other projects of his, began to take out patents to try to control the use of movie technology. He wanted to become the Edison monopoly. He was fantasizing that he would control the movie-- whatever the movie industry would become, Edison's company fantasized it was going to take control of that. And, in fact, the Edison Company hired law enforcement officers and, according to some historians, even in some places hired goons, thugs, to go and break up the sets and the shooting of rival producers who were, according to Edison, infringing on Edison copyrights. So the other reason-- another reason for the move to the West Coast was a lot of the entrepreneurial movie makers wanted to get free of the patent police. They wanted to get out from under the scrutiny of Edison and his police. And by running to the West Coast, they were able to do so. And, in fact, Edison was unsuccessful in controlling the technology, as Cook and other historians have made clear to us. So the move to the West Coast is a very important one. And I will return to the cultural, the historical, and ideological or intellectual implications of that move to the West Coast in a few lectures, maybe next week if I get the opportunity. Because I want to talk a little bit more about what it meant for American movies that film was made on the farthest western verge of the society, away from cultural centers, unlike the way in which movies developed in Europe. And I'll talk about that implication a bit later. Probably next week, when we talk about the great German silent film that concludes our segment on silent films. So even before Chaplin enters, the rudiments-- or more than the rudiments, the basic system of mass production, of studio-based production, of manufacture of the films in one place and then the distribution system that developed in which theaters essentially rented or purchased films from the producers was already in place. And, of course, the two great figures here is Thomas Ince-- and Cook writes very well about Ince and his contribution to the movies-- probably the person to whom we could attribute the invention of the movie studio, I suppose. And Mack Sennett, who developed the Keystone Studios, out of which so many important early comedies emerged and the studio which Chaplin joined when he came to the United States to become a movie maker in, I think, 1911 or 1912. So Ince and Mack Sennett are important. And one might say one further thing about this moment. As you know if you've read Cook, Sennett created what came to be called the Keystone Studios. And Keystone Studios were named, I think-- or maybe it was the reverse. I'm not sure-- was associated with their prime product in the early days. And they were called the Keystone Kops Komedies. We're going to show you a fragment of those in a moment. They were frenzied action, frenzied physical action. So this is the era. This is the moment, the period in the first 10 years of the movie industry in the United States, when the basic system is being, by trial and error, worked out. And by the time Chaplin comes to join the system after the first decade or so of the 20th century, the system essentially is in place. There are already a number of famous performers, both in comedy and in drama.