CULTURAL CONTEXT

• The thirty-five year span of the silent film era lasted between the initial development of film technology around 1894 and the introduction of synchronised sound in 1929.
• The silent period saw filmmakers working to develop film narrative and film form.
• The silent period saw to communicate effectively through purely visual means.
• Film during the silent period is associated with the wider cultural and artistic movement of modernism
• The addition of sound was in 1927
• Mary Pickford (one of the most powerful women hollywood has known, once known as 'the biograph girl') made over 100 films with DW Griffith and was the first actor to insist her name over the movie on the poster.
• WWI destroyed the European film industry causing American Film Industry to quickly fill the void.
• Modernism


  By modernising traditional techniques, artists can reflect the modernising of culture, e.g. industrial areas, rapid growth of cities, technology, transport etc...
• Modernism - artistic / creative movements that fall under it


  Cubism

  Surrealism

  Futurism

  Constructivism
• Futurism

  Futurists attempted to capture the experience of travelling at high speed, which they associated with modern technologies.
• Surrealism


  An artistic movement that began in 1924.

  It aims to revolutionalise human experience, balancing a ration vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.

  The movements artists find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional.
• Modern techniques was a significant theme in the work of Buster Keaton and the work of Dali (surrealist artist) and the relationship between man and the modern machinery of the mechanised world show through
• Constructivism


  Concerned with the construction of new, modern, social and cultural artefacts to serve revolutionary purposes.
• Constructivism removed the heirarchy between the arts and crafts, men and women, rich and poor, high and 'low' culture.
• 1920 - 1929 was the late silent period / modernist film movement, before the consolidation of the Hollywood studios.
• Industrial capitalism is a modern aspect to BK.
• Vote for women was legalised in the 1920s
• Prohibition: the action of forbidding something, especially by law, of alcohol
• THE SHOCK OF THE MODERN
• One Week house - parody of 'Home Made' produced by Ford Motor Company.
• Buster Keaton uses architecture as a presentation of his technical skill and links with modernity + art movements such as cubism.
• Keaton uses architecture as a form of expressionism - an anarchic take in subverting modern ideals through mechanisation and mass production.