English
Perhaps more a stylist with the insight needed to refine and extend the techniques and methods in combination with existing cinematic conventions of art, literature and Victorian theater that a true innovator, the truth is it´s hard to argue that David. W. Griffith deserves the honorary title of “father of cinema,” if we consider the way his extensive work decisively shaped the language and syntax prevalent in film making for over fifty years starting with the most basic elements of the trade.
The great Austrian director Eric von Stroheim, responsible for some of the most memorable films of all times, which in its infancy, having begun working as an extra, became assistant director of Griffith, said of him that he took charge of poetry and beauty in what until then was a form of cheap tawdry and tacky entertainment
For the truth is that this film was essentially in those early years of the century something of a confusing matter in America, movies were fast moving consumer goods that were bought by the meter and displayed as part of vaudeville and variety or booth. Some of those petty first exhibitors hoping to make some money with what was essentially still considered a novelty with a bad reputation and a low prestige miles away from any artistic pretension (a famous assertion of a famous theater critic in 1905 referred to the convenience of shooting anyone who genuinely enjoyed a movie) became a term yet not too long ago as the highest magnates and rulers of the mighty and dazzling Hollywood Empire, whose powerful influence soon would seize the dreams and the unconscious of most of the inhabitants of the planet. The finished exercising rigid control in every aspect of American cinema was paradoxically responsible to some extent of the ostracism of Griffith himself, whose work, after the commercial failure of Intolerance in 1916, so colossal and disproportionate as its own sets and ambition of the film, was choked by the constraints of the studio system.
These men (Zukor, Fox, Mayer, Laemmle, the Warner brothers …) in more than one aspect are the true inventors of Hollywood, thanks to their recklessness, insight and skill for business and who were able to emerge as winners of the wars for control of patents in the first decade of the century, who were mostly, like von Stroheim´s first-generation of Jewish origin European immigrants
They, as well as the evolution of the Jewish presence in Hollywood, is what the Jewish Museum of Vienna is dedicated to in this very interesting exhibition opened until April 15th
More info: http://www.jmw.at/en
Of those pioneers responsible for the manufacturing of the images we associate with the American Dream artists such as Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand or the Coen brothers, this is a pleasant route you may want to do when renting apartments in Vienna
Translated by: Marc
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