Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Parade's Gone By..., then, is a history of the American film from its genesis through a period of fertile collaborative art (roughly defined as the Silent period) to an eventual corruption, blamed on the shift of power from directors to producers and, most evil, the premature advent of the sound film...
Even in this decade where film has become a pedestrian academic, a kid making his first movie discovers it all for the first time, regardless of the countless hours spent watching and studying films in theatres, TV screens, or white walls. He discovers first that working behind a camera is physically exhausting; more traumatic is the realization that making a film with actors is often a ruthless procedure, one which requires making your friends take an awful lot of chances. Once you start, you can only push to the finish and hope that those same friends don't get lost...
THIS DECISION is both professionally ethical and deeply moral, in that it implies a conviction for the purity of your working method, and an ultimate respect for the audience that finally affords everyone connected with any film the huge pay-off that justifies the slow process of shooting and cutting a dramatic narrative. But the film-maker's decision to put his cast through hell, perversely moral though it may be in the abstract, is supremely selfish. This cannot be divorced from the making of a first film any more than frame composition or cutting...
...stress first films, partly because no one ever takes as many chances as they do in their first film, but mostly because the movies that represent the current professional product in America take no chances at all. Kevin Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By... recalls that Ramon Novarro and Frank Currier doing the raft scene in Ben-Hur (1926) exposed themselves for three days to freezing winds and icy water at four hour stretches, narrowly avoiding pneumonia. But, when Wyler remade Ben-Hur in 1959 when technical proficiency could have compensated for weather variables, the scene was poorly synthesized...
...honestly, unhampered by union restrictions, production supervision, and general professional laziness. Many statements, among them Nancy Carroll's memoir of shooting MGM's The Water Hole in the heart of Death Valley (the casualty rate approaching Stroheim's for Greed, the most famous horror story of Death Valley's filming), suggest strongly that the first American film-makers willingly demanded a verisimilitude unknown to most of today's artists. Brownlow quotes the great French director Abel Gance (La Roue, Napoleon...