The Rise Of The Motion Picture (Review)

The motion picture industry has been commercialized from its birth but did anyone in 1900 know the impact that it would have on the 20th century?

In lecture 8 of Paul Cantor’s series on Commerce and Culture, he dives into the motion picture industry and its beginnings.

He’s been discussing people like Shakespeare and his plays, Ruben and Rembrandt and their paintings, Mozart and his music, Dickens and his novels, and many other artists. Cantor has been showing that even though many people picture these artists of history as “starving artists” who were never fully appreciated for the art they produced, that was simply not the case. All of these artists were heavily involved in commercializing their talents and heavily involved in the market.

We have less of a hard time imagining that the art of the motion picture industry is commercial, perhaps because we see it even today. We see how much money Hollywood makes, how much they market the things it produces. Cantor explains that it was like this from its birth. When Thomas Edison invented the technology for the motion picture, it was immediately used for profit and for increasing commercial gain.

However, the motion picture instead had the issue of people wondering if this new technology was actually art. In the past, art was seen as something with a single author. People liked being able to credit things to a certain person. But movies were often made by many people. They were also incredibly messy and had unpredictable processes.

Cantor compares the process of movie making to the way sausages are made. No one wants to see how a sausage is made, and once they do, it turns their stomach a little when they eat it. The same goes for movies. If people saw how movies were actually made, they would probably not enjoy the final product as much.

For instance, Cantor gives the example of Casa Blanca. There have been 9 writers who have all been credited with having a part in writing it (though I think only three are listed in the end credits). The entire time they were filming the movie, no one knew how they were going to end it. Eventually, the actors and actresses demanded that they figure out what the ending would be so that they knew how to act with their counterparts.

What they basically did then was go through and make an ending that they thought the audience would like based on the rest of the movie (“They’ll want to see him die here. They’ll want to see such-and-such kill him” etc.). The entirely made up the ending on what they thought would please audiences most.

This is probably not what you want to hear. People want there to be some big masterplan behind things. They want to be able to predict what happens. We talked a little about this in the last post talking about Totalitarianism. People like control over things and they like to think that art is completely planned out and made perfect because of that. However, really good art is often a result of spontaneous thoughts and ideas, and in the end, luck.

No one knows when they post a video on Youtube that it’s going to go viral. It is controlled by whatever the market at that time decides they are going to enjoy watching/reading/seeing. Art is a risky business.

This is not to say a lot of planning doesn’t go into film. Spending so much money on something, of course there are incredible and vast plans that have to be made. However, the end results of these films very rarely look exactly like what they imagined at the beginning.

Similar to life. It’s good to make plans and have some goals, but if you stick only to your plans you’re probably going to miss out on some incredible opportunities. If you are willing to look for new ideas and take opportunities when they come up, though, you open yourself up to an exciting potential future.

After all, if you make enough movies, eventually, you’re bound to make a good one.