Ida Z's Film Class Notes: Technological Innovations of the 20's

Technological Innovations of the 20's

Impressive production values
1)Other innovations during the 1920s responded to producers’ desire to give their films
impressive production values.
2)Designers pioneered the use of false perspectives and models to make sets look bigger.
3)A marginal Expressionist film, The Street (1923), used an elaborate model to represent a
cityscape in the background of one scene, with a real car and actors in the foreground.
4)Tiny cars and dolls moving on tracks in the distance in The Last Laugh made the street
in front of the hotel set seem bigger than it really was.
5)In this area, the Germans were ahead of the Americans, and
6)Hollywood cinematographers and designers picked up tips on models and false perspective
by watching German films and visiting the German studios.

The Entfesselte Camera
1) One German technological innovation of the 1920s became internationally influential: the
entfesselte camera (literally, the “unfastened camera,” or the camera moving freely
through space).
2)During the early 1920s, some German filmmakers began experimenting with elaborate
camera movements.
3)In the script for the Kammerspiel film Sylvester, Carl Mayer specified that the camera
should be mounted on a dolly to take it smoothly through the revelry of a city street

Last Laugh and Moving Camera
1) The film that popularized the moving camera, though, was Murnau’s The Last Laugh.
2) There the camera descends in an elevator in the opening shot;
3) later it seems to fly through space to follow the blare of a trumpet to the protagonist,
who is listening in a window high above.
4)When he gets drunk at a party, the camera spins with him on a turntable.

The film was widely seen in the United States and earned Murnau a contract with Fox.

The Last Laugh