Page 47 - summer 22

Gone With The Wind (1940) was the first great movie of the era of both sound and

colour, and the 1940’s is usually called the Golden Age of Hollywood.

1939, the beginning of Hollywood’s Golden Age decade

At first, as with photography, no one was sure what to make of it. Was it art or mere
mechanical visual recording? People marvelled at early screen projections of trains
entering a station or the wind blowing through leaves cinema comes from kine,

movement) , and its story telling potential was soon realised. But was it superior to
literature for its greater realism and visual richness, or inferior because it only
showed the visible not the interior of people? Modernist art had moved away from
representational painting yet film seemed to be pure representation (the Futurists
however called it “an autonomous art”). Others saw its visual aspect as having
potential for democracy, “literature for the illiterate”, and for world peace because it
could surmount language barriers by being a “universal language”. In fact, critics later

noted that although film industries grew quickly in many countries, cinema soon
became Eurocentric and from the start there were complaints about how non-whites
races were portrayed (see The Birth of a Nation, below).

An early writer on film, the Italian avant-garde film-maker Ricciotto Canudo, was in
no doubt, calling cinema a new art form, “plastic art in motion”. He believed that film