МИНИСТЕРСТВО КУЛЬТУРЫ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ

ФЕДЕРАЛЬНОЕ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЕ ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЕ УЧРЕЖДЕНИЕ

ВЫСШЕГО ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОГО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ

«САНКТ-ПЕТЕРБУРГСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ

УНИВЕРСИТЕТ КИНО И ТЕЛЕВИДЕНИЯ»

Кафедра иностранных языков

история американского кино

Учебно-методическое пособие по английскому языку                    для студентов 2 курса факультета экранных искусств

Часть I

Санкт-Петербург

2011

Составитель: старший преподаватель кафедры иностранных языков                            Голубева С.Л.

Рецензенты: доцент кафедры иностранных языков Л.А. Авакян,

кандидат педагогических наук, доцент кафедры иностранных                       языков Мирошникова Н.Н.

Рекомендовано к изданию в качестве учебно-методического пособия для студентов II курса ФЭИ всех специальностей кафедрой иностранных языков Санкт-Петербургского Государственного Университета Кино и Телевидения.

Протокол № заседания кафедры от.

Предлагаемое учебно-методическое пособие предназначено для устной и письменной практики в обучении студентов по программам ESP. Оно представляет собой тексты по истории американского кино из книги американского писателя Роберта Скляра ‘Movie-made America’, адаптированные для студентов II курса ФЭИ. Пособие также содержит послетекстовые лексические упражнения и глоссарий по специализированной тематике.

ABOUT THE BOOK

‘MOVIE-MADE AMERICA’ BY ROBERT SCLAR

/ A cultural history of American movies /

PART 1: THE RISE OF MOVIE CULTURE

1. The Birth of a Mass Medium

2. Nickel Madness

3. Edison’s Trust and How It Got Basted

4. D. W. Griffith and the Forging of Motion-Picture Art

GLOSSARY

Robert Sklar was born in 1936 and was educated in the public schools of Long Beach, California and Princeton University. After working as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, he received his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization

from Harvard University in 1965. R. Sklar is a historian and writer on twentieth-

century American culture and society, and is the author of F. Scott Fitzgerald :

The Last Laocoon, and editor of The Plastic Age, an anthology on 1920s culture.

He has taught overseas in New Zealand and Japan. He lives in New York.

This is a book devoted to the history of American movie, combining social history, economics and a precise and effective sense of film criticism. It is well-written and expertly illustrated. The book explains many little-known aspects of the American film industry, but, more important, it also goes a long way toward explaining America.

This book is divided in four thematic parts broken down into 18 chapters, followed by references and index.

As suggested by the title, the first part, consisting of chapters 1-4, discusses the rise of movie culture.

PART I: THE RISE OF MOVIE CULTURE

1. The birth of a mass medium

For the first half of the twentieth century – from 1896 to 1946 – movies were the most popular and influential medium of culture in the USA. They were the first of the modern mass media, and they rose to the surface of cultural consciousness from the bottom up, receiving their principal support from the lowest and most invisible classes in American society.

The two decades from 1890 to 1910 span the gap from the beginning of motion pictures to their firm establishment as mass entertainment; they are also the years

when the United States transformed itself into a predominantly urban industrial society.

Around 1890 new forms of entertainment began to appear in and around the growing cities – amusement parks like Coney Island, major-league baseball, dime museums, continuous vaudeville, but these were rare treats for workers and their families.

Then, in 1893, came Edison’s kinetoscope peep show, and in 1896, large-screen motion-picture projection. The movies moved into vaudeville houses and theatres.

The urban workers, the immigrants and the poor had discovered a new medium of entertainment.

The history of motion pictures has been traced back two hundred years. It begins with Marey and Muybridge. The French scientist Etienne Jules Marey and the British-born American photographer Edward Muybridge – lived long enough to realize that the general public was drawn to movies for the same reasons as they were: because movies subjected time and motion to the human will.

Thomas Alva Edison, like Marey, was an inventor, but he was also an entertainer and entrepreneur. By 1890 Edison’s wizardry had given the American people and the world the telephone transmitter, the photograph and the electric light. From the moment of his invention of the photograph in 1877 Edison probably had in mind some link between his talking machine and the projected photographs. Edison was not the only man in the late nineteenth century who thought that the illusion motion ought to be as lifelike as possible, with a human-size picture, synchronized sound, color and three-dimensionality.

As the kinetoscope business began to wane, a second American motion-picture producer came to the market with a competing machine. This was the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company with its mutoscope viewing machine, which contained postcard-size flip cards rather than strip film. The technical expert behind the new company was W. K. L. Dickson.

Dickson and Edison were among several inventors in Europe and America working to achieve large-scale motion-picture projections. In the winter of

1895-1896 at least two such efforts came to fruition, the Lumiere brothers’ projector in France and a device developed by Thomas Armat and C. Francis Jenkins in the United States, which Edison contracted to market under his own name as the Vitascope.

The natural places to find large and willing audiences for large-screen motion pictures were vaudeville theatres. Edison premiered the Vitascope at Koster and Bial’s house in New York, and other machines followed in rival houses.

As a business, and a social phenomenon, the motion pictures came to life in the United States when they made contact with working-class needs and desires.

The programs lasted no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, short enough for a housewife to leave a carriage in the vestibule and carry her baby inside, for children to drop in after school, for factory workers to see a show on the way home from work. A movie for a nickel in a curtained-off corner of the store in back! Nickolets they were called in one city, nickeldromes in another, nickelodeons more frequently elsewhere. And a vast new audience for movies was born.