The first character of the cinema was the mass: In La sortie des usines Lumière, credited as the first ever film, a crowd of factory workers leave a factory. While on repeated viewings you could begin to pick out the quirks and personalities of certain subjects, the real character was the group, the mass, the crowd. Early cinema, in particular in the work of the Lumière’s was emblematic of this style, the cities, the environment and the crowd itself were almost always the subject: the individual would come later. As cinema grew as an industry, it eventually morphed into a cinema of the individual. This seemed natural, as the capitalist nature of industry was one that favored individual accomplishment above all else. This remains core to our central understanding of narrative filmmaking to this day, and with few exceptions (perhaps most notably the Russian cinema of the 1920s) remains the status quo.
- 12/11/2014
- by Justine Smith
- SoundOnSight
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